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The role of the University is to resist AI

xt of a seminar given at the Goldsmiths Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought on June 11th 2025 I would like to thank the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought for inviting me to give this seminar. This talk is titled 'The role of the University is to resist AI', and takes as its text Ivan Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality'.

When similar AI was adopted by the LA Times to add journalistic balance to opinion pieces, it rebalanced an article about the KKK by clarifying the Klan as a product of white Protestant culture that was simply responding to societal changes. The technopolitical transformation of which AI is a part isn't simply a matter of market capture, but of a wider nihilism that seizes material and energy resources, driven by an unrelenting will to power and the reformulation of racial supremacy via algorithmically-mediated eugenics. The role of the university isn't to roll over in the face of tall tales about technological inevitability, but to model the forms of critical pedagogy that underpin the social defence against authoritarianism and which makes space to reimagine the other worlds that are still possible.

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