“How do we break something that is already broken?” Virtual Assembly, CAIN-CPCT

"How do we break something that is already broken?" Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network (CAIN), 27-29 May 2026 Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths

Let us begin with our premise: AI is a broken technology. Despite the many hubristic claims made by its proprietary owners and amplified by the media, AI has no way to deliver on its promises to bring about societal benefits for all by increasing productivity, lowering costs, and accelerating innovation. Yet the rhetoric that surrounds AI’s incursions into our worlds of work and life has acted persuasively to cover for widespread precaritisation. Meanwhile, AI’s shoddy predictions and slop production further harm the marginalised and its immense resource demands hasten the destruction of the environment. Might we therefore not speculate that AI’s purpose is actually to break things by virtue of its very brokenness, not least any irksome movements towards racial, gender, class, or climate justice?

AI may not be the cause of our current polycrisis but it condenses the forces that brought them about, which it then amplifies, intensifies, and adds to. A critical approach to AI rejects the inevitability of this state of affairs. Instead, a critical approach recognises AI as merely the latest broken product of an already broken system, peddled under a techno-utopian guise in a desperate attempt to persuade us that energy-guzzling machine gods are our only hope out of our predicament. We therefore posit that the entangled dynamics of AI are useful diagrams of the economic, political, and ideological syndromes that lie beneath. AI’s stuttering operations dredge up misshapen philosophies, colonial dreams and a reactionary contempt for relations of care, and put them on full display. Our approach to AI asks how we break this brokenness. How can we who are forced to inhabit the dysfunction that AI names resist AI, recompose liveable lives from within the wreckage of computational nihilism, and craft its distortions into infrastructures for the common good?

The virtual assembly will take place online on 27, 28 and 29 May 2026 from 4-8pm (UK). For this inaugural event, we have identified three domains of inquiry to explore as a first step:

A. AI in Education, AI as Education — Wednesday, 27 May 2026

B. AI in and as Law, Governance, and Politics — Thursday, 28 May 2026

C. The Ecology of AI, AI and the Environment — Friday, 29 May 2026

This assembly is an initiative of the Critical AI Network and our email list will be the main communication channel for it. If you are interested in taking part, either as a contributor or a participant, please sign up to the list here: https://jiscmail.ac.uk/CPCT-CRITICALAINETWORK.

Information on how to participate.

Dates & times

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