Table Of ContentAndreas Sudmann (ed.)
The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence
AI Critique | Volume 1
Editorial
Since Kant, critique has been defined as the effort to examine the way things
work with respect to the underlying conditions of their possibility; in addition,
since Foucault it references a thinking about »the art of not being governed like
that and at that cost.« In this spirit, KI-Kritik / AI Critique publishes recent ex-
plorations of the (historical) developments of machine learning and artificial in-
telligence as significant agencies of our technological times, drawing on contri-
butions from within cultural and media studies as well as other social sciences.
The series is edited by Anna Tuschling, Andreas Sudmann and Bernhard J.
Dotzler.
Andreas Sudmann teaches media studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. His re-
search revolves around aesthetic, political and philosophical questions on digi-
tal and popular media in general and AI-driven technologies in particular.
Andreas Sudmann (ed.)
The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence
Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms
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Content
The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence
Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms
Andreas Sudmann .............................................................................................................9
Metaphors We Live By
Three Commentaries on Artificial Intelligence and the Human Condition
Anne Dippel ....................................................................................................................33
AI, Stereotyping on Steroids and Alan Turing’s Biological Turn
V. N. Alexander ................................................................................................................43
Productive Sounds
Touch-Tone Dialing, the Rise of the Call Center Industry
and the Politics of Virtual Voice Assistants
Axel Volmar .....................................................................................................................55
Algorithmic Trading, Artificial Intelligence
and the Politics of Cognition
Armin Beverungen ..........................................................................................................77
The Quest for Workable Data
Building Machine Learning Algorithms from Public Sector Archives
Lisa Reutter/Hendrik Storstein Spilker ...........................................................................95
Plural, Situated Subjects in the Critique of Artificial Intelligence
Tobias Matzner ..............................................................................................................109
Deep Learning’s Governmentality
The Other Black Box
Jonathan Roberge/Kevin Morin/Marius Senneville ........................................................123
Reduction and Participation
Stefan Rieger ................................................................................................................143
The Political Affinities of AI
Dan McQuillan ...............................................................................................................163
Artificial Intelligence
Invisible Agencies in the Folds of Technological Cultures
Yvonne Förster ..............................................................................................................175
Race and Computer Vision
Alexander Monea ...........................................................................................................189
Mapping the Democratization of AI on GitHub
A First Approach
Marcus Burkhardt .........................................................................................................209
On the Media-political Dimension of Artificial Intelligence
Deep Learning as a Black Box and OpenAI
Andreas Sudmann .........................................................................................................223
How to Safeguard AI
Ina Schieferdecker/Jürgen Großmann/Martin A. Schneider .........................................245
AI, Democracy and the Law
Christian Djeffal............................................................................................................255
Rethinking the Knowledge Problem in an Era
of Corporate Gigantism
Frank Pasquale .............................................................................................................285
Artificial Intelligence and the Democratization of Art
Jens Schröter ...............................................................................................................297
“That is a 1984 Orwellian future at our doorstep, right?“
Natural Language Processing, Artificial Neural Networks
and the Politics of (Democratizing) AI
Andreas Sudmann/Alexander Waibel ............................................................................313
Biographies ...................................................................................................325
Acknowledgments ......................................................................................333
The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence
Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms
Andreas Sudmann
Diagnoses of time are naturally a difficult undertaking. Nevertheless, it is proba-
bly an adequate observation that, in our present historical situation, the concern
for the stability and future of democracy is particularly profound (cf. Rapoza 2019).
The objects of this concern are, on the one hand, developments which seem to have
only a limited or indirect connection with questions of technology, such as the
current rise of right-wing populism and authoritarianism, especially in Europe
and in the US, or “the resurgence of confrontational geopolitics” (Valladão 2018).
On the other hand, we witness an increasingly prevalent discourse that negotiates
the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) as a potentially serious threat
to democracy and democratic values, but which—with important exceptions—
seems to be largely disconnected from the specific political conditions and de-
velopments of individual countries (cf. Webb 2019). Within this discourse, prob-
lematizing AI as jeopardizing democratic values and principles refers to different,
but partly linked phenomena. Central reference points of these discussions are,
for instance, the socio-political consequences of AI technologies for the future
job market (catch phrase: “the disappearance of work”), the deployment of AI to
manipulate visual information or to create ‘fake news’, the geo-political effects of
autonomous weapon systems, or the application of AI methods through vast sur-
veillance networks for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk pro-
files in criminal justice systems, or for demographic and psychographic targeting
of bodies for advertising, propaganda, and other forms of state intervention.1
Prima facie, both forms of concern about the global state of democracy do not
have much in common, but it is precisely for this reason that one needs to ex-
plore their deeper connections. For example, US President Donald Trump recently
launched a so-called “American AI initiative”, whose explicit goal is to promote
the development of smart technologies in a way that puts American interests first.
1 It goes without saying that not all of those aspects that for some reason appear to be worthy of
critique represent an immediate danger to the democratic order of a society. However, it is also
obvious that government and society must find answers to all problems of AI.
