Dan McQuillan

@danmcquillan

431 Folgt7.979 Follower1.139 Posts

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This looks like a well-researched and situated counter to Masley's 'do your own Qanon research' - 'The AI Data Center Water Management Challenge: A Georgia Case Study' tapsrundry.com/georgia-wate... Blunter version from the author in this pod youtube.com/watch?v=oNSQ...

Screenshot of the Environment Variables podcast youtube channel showing the episode titled 'TWiGS: The AI Water Management Challenge with Masheika Allgood'

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· 12d

AlphaFold was always bait-and-switch; now Google confirms it. A hyper-narrow bioinformatrics model with actual science bolted on whose guesses can be experimentally checked was never a licence for socially-applied slop at scale, but it's done its job. Effort transferred to LLMs.

Screenshot of Financial Times headline reading "Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift" with photo of Demis Hassabis & John Jumper

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· 15d

Looking forward to a book titled 'Destructively Scan This Book!' in homage to Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_T...

Screenshot from from arstechnica:
Headline: "Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models - Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world"
Picture: the end image of a large pile of books

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Jun 16

As media opinion increasingly tries to discredit data centre opposition for being reactionary populism, it's important for campaigns to squash any possible far right infiltration by explicitly declaring themselves as anti-racist and anti-fascist.

Headline from the Financial Times that reads "The coming rise of anti-AI populism - Anxiety about the technology is set to generate a political backlash". The photo shows a data centre protest in the USA. URL for the story https://archive.ph/tkFwz

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Jun 15

Very late notice, but I'll be doing an informal talk and discussion for SPINE (Speculative Inquiry into Ethics) tomorrow on 'AI, Decomputing and its Discontents'. Open registration events.teams.microsoft.com/event/efc27d...

Flyer with abstract graphic reading: SPINE 6: Dr Dan McQuillan // AI, Decomputing and its Discontents, Tuesday 16 June, 2:00 pm

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 26

"Salvia Women's Therapy Centre provides mental health services for women who would not normally have access due to poverty, ethnicity or learning disability. Their experiences include trauma from domestic abuse, trafficking and FGM." #fundraiser www.justgiving.com/charity/salv...

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 20

Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network, 27th-29th May, online. 27 amazing talks + 3 keynotes + plenary discussions. AI/Education, AI/Law+Politics, AI/Environment. Registration & network sign-up: cpct.uk/2026/05/09/p... Full programme: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Poster for the Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network
27-29 May 2026
With white and green text ofver anti-AI graffiti
Keynotes by Helen Beetham, Dan McQuillan, Fieke Jansen
Link to register https://tinyurl.com/critical-ai-network

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 18

Dear Wes Streeting, thank you for trying to force GPs in the UK to use these systems.

screenshot of https://x.com/nick_kapur/status/2056108360580104697 which reads
"An auditor for the Ontario, Canada government found that AI agents tasked with turning doctor/patient conversations into structured notes routinely hallucinated false treatments, replaced drug names with entirely different drugs, and missed crucial information"
and shows an accompanying chart of the % failures in different categories

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 13

Only one week until the first virtual assembly of our Critical AI Network “How do we break something that is already broken?”. Three days of quick-fire presentations + keynotes on AI in/as Education, AI in/as Law, Governance & Politics, The Ecology of AI/AI & the Environment cpct.uk/2026/05/09/p...

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 9

screenshot of https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/116535838581771880 that reads:
"LOCALLY 👏🏻 HOSTED 👏🏻 TORMENT 👏🏻 NEXUS"

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 8

"In the same way it's impossible to read a human mind, it's hard to know what an AI is thinking" IT'S NOT THINKING. "It takes an AI's internal thoughts" IT'S NOT THINKING. "Just like you and me Claude doesn't say everything it's thinking" IT'S NOT THINKING. Pure 💩 get serious.

Post on x.com from Anthropic, with accompanying video
"New Anthropic research: Natural Language Autoencoders.
Models like Claude talk in words but think in numbers. The numbers—called activations—encode Claude’s thoughts, but not in a language we can read.
Here, we train Claude to translate its activations into human-readable text."

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 7

I have a 4th position on AI (not sci-fi, not productive, not normal, but diagnostic of systemic collapse). More in 'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' - paper zenodo.org/records/1945..., video www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U...

Screenshot of the start of a long post on x.com from Machine Learning Street Talk https://x.com/MLStreetTalk
"On the a16z piece: In Twitter discourse, you will see three positions on AI; it's a singularity-class event, it's an industrial-revolution-class event, or it's a "normal technology" like cloud computing...."

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 7

Book launch in London next week for @thomas-dekeyser.bsky.social's excellent contribution to the struggle: 'An Evening of Techno-Negativity with MayDay rooms and Thomas Dekeyser' maydayrooms.org/event/an-eve...

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 6

How very Silicon Valley / Starmer's Labour; the conduit from Big Tech who passed messages to Reeves to sabotage regulation and boost AI growth zones had a previous job where he "ran a corporate intelligence firm founded by former British spies". archive.ph/45OwE

Screenshot of Guardian headline reading "Starmer adviser held 16 undisclosed meetings with top US tech bosses. Exclusive: Varun Chandra’s talks with Google, Meta, Apple and others raise fears of ‘lobbying behind closed doors’", accompanied by a photo of Varun Chandra

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 6

My co-panellists on this BUP webinar will be Masoumeh Iran Mansouri ('How to be ‘anti-AI’ in the 21st century' bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...) and Patrick Brodie ('From the Bog to the Cloud - Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland') bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/from-the-bog...

screenshot of the regostration page for the event, showing the title 'Colonialism in the Digital Age: The Fight for a Livable Future' and time May 12, 2026 03:00 PM alongside an abstract graphic/

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 4

Anyone seen a good analysis of colleague-skills archive.ph/uvqBx and anti-distillation officechai.com/ai/chinas-wo...? Seems like a 'moral panic' that fuses legit fear of bosses replacing workers with hype about limited and hugely unreliable agentic AI.

Headline from linked article that reads:
"China’s Workers Are Weaponizing AI Against Each Other Through Colleague.Skill Files — And Fighting Back.
In Chinese tech offices, a new arms race has begun. It runs not on hardware, but on .skill files.
A GitHub project called 同事.skill (“colleague.skill”) has gone viral in China’s corporate world. The concept is simple and brutal: feed an AI model enough information about a coworker — their work logic, domain knowledge, communication style, even their daily habits — and you produce a digital replica capable of substituting for them. Once the “colleague skill” is deployed, the original employee becomes, in theory, redundant."

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· May 1

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_a...

Headline from the FT reading "France allows flower shops and bakeries to open on May Day - Government agrees to drop broader reform that would have seen other businesses work on sacrosanct national holiday" accompanied by a photo of a woman looking at a flower stall.

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 29

'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' zenodo.org/records/1945...

screenshot of linkedin post that reads: "New pre-print by Daniel McQuillan is essential reading on the polycrisis & AI. He offers us ways to think about AI as both new AND as the result of very old logics of extraction, neoliberalism (and Liberalism!), racism and misogyny. He also gives examples and a framework for "infrastructural intersectionality" and processes of decomputing—degrowth, de-automatization, and conviviality, all placing social needs above profit, surveillance, and control. Thank you, Dan! So helpful."

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 17

Looking forward to debating the contradictions of AI at 'Resisting Big Tech Empires' (Sat 25th). What's happening when $$$ is poured into extractive but failing tech? How is AI a diagnostic for the nihilistic turn in geopolitics? What can we do about it? www.globaljustice.org.uk/event/resist...

event graphic:
"Resisting Big Tech Empires: The fight for the future
Saturday 25th, London
Cory Doctorow, multi-award-winning novelist and campaigner
Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change, India
Sofia Scasserra, Our World is Not for Sale, Argentina
James Meadway, Macrodose podcast
Khem Rogaly, Common Wealth
Cecilia Rikap, digital sovereignty researcher, UCL
Dan McQuillan, author of Resisting AI
Nick Srnicek, author of Silicon Empires and Platform Capitalism
Rosa Curling, Foxglove
Nafeez Ahmed, author of Alt Reich
Sophia Goodfriend, journalist on AI and war
Rebel Tech Alliance"

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 16

IPPR recommends: "Deploying AI engineers to schools, hospitals ... to experiment with where AI can improve outcomes" - why not ask people already working there about outcomes? I'm betting 'fix the leaking roof' and 'stop making cuts' would come out ahead of 'more AI please')

screenshot of Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) page https://www.ippr.org/media-office/government-risks-techlash-unless-it-shows-who-benefits-from-ai-ippr-warns
Text reads:
"Government risks ‘techlash’ unless it shows who benefits from AI, IPPR warns
AI could deepen inequality, concentrate power and disrupt jobs without intervention
Ministers urgently need to spread the benefits as industry grows
Think tank calls for sovereign AI fund to share economic gains with the public
The UK government risks being boxed in by AI backlash if they don’t share the benefits of the technology with the public, according to a new report from IPPR."

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 15

Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of the artist Alistair Gentry. A true gent and a creative fighter for the marginalised. See examples of his work here alistairgentry.net and donate to help with funeral costs here www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding... RIP comrade ✊

Header image from Alistair's website showing his DoxBox trustbot from 2019, accompanied by a figure dressed as a puppet in a kimono.

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 14

"So whatever problem AI attempts to solve becomes what philosopher Henri Bergson would call a ‘ready-made problem’ – a problem that is expressed as a function of things prior to itself that have already been turned into abstractions". ('Resisting AI', p43)

Screenshot of an FT article.
Headline: AI chatbots misdiagnose in over 80% of early medical cases, study finds
image: man at a desk with an open laptop and a phone showing an active chatbot
text: Consumer AI chatbots falter when used to make medical diagnoses, particularly when faced with incomplete information, according to new research highlighting the risks of relying on them as digital doctors.
The study finds that leading large language models struggle to suggest a range of possible diagnoses when patient data is limited, frequently narrowing too quickly to a single answer.
The results point to a broader limitation in AI: while chatbots can identify likely conditions once a case is fully specified, they are less reliable at the earlier, more uncertain stages of clinical reasoning.
The findings highlight the dangers of relying on the technology alone to pinpoint health problems, particularly in cases where the data users input may be vague or patchy.
“These models are great at naming a final diagnosis once the data is complete, but they struggle at the open-ended start of a case, when there isn’t much information,” said Arya Rao, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Massachusetts-based Mass General Brigham healthcare system

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 14

ICYMI I'll be reprising 'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' for the Uni of Johannesburg this afternoon. Yes I'm aware their comms team trolled me with a truly horrible genAI graphic😷. The talk is on Teams, link in the flyer at drive.google.com/file/d/1RYOY...

image: A truly horrible genAI graphic showing a laptop imposed over a dystopic city with windmills and tower blocks.
text: The Faculty of Humanities and the cordially invites you to a
4IR Distinguished Seminar titled: AI, Decomputing and the
Interregnum
This lecture explores AI’s contradiction: a failing technology drawing massive investment, diagnosing
crises like neoliberal breakdown, patriarchal subjectivity, and energy politics. It amplifies problems
through scaling and accelerationism, serving as technopolitics of the interregnum to maintain hegemonic
control. Yet, it signals alternatives via decomputing—a movement tackling technology’s politics and
subjectivity. Proposing degrowth, deautomatisation, and convivial tools centering interdependence
and situatedness, it re-socialises energy/water resources against data centres’ demands, ad
teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/35663973297546?p=8SNjajfNuytAYxBaTN
time; 1th April 2026 at 16:00 Johannesburg time

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 13

This week-long summer study session looks right on point: 'Low-Tech, Luddism and Liberation: reclaiming technology for the collective good' www.nsuweb.org/circle-9-deg... Also family-friendly & includes documentary viewings, poetry readings, hiking excursions and music nights.

A graphic image showing a prosthesis maintenance day at a hackerspace.
Image Credit: The.lemonaut.ukr / Wikimedia Commons

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 13

Graphic: black text on tan background, overlaid on a red square.
central banner reads "STOP FORCING AI INTO FUCKING EVERYTHING"
circular text around banner reads "NOBODY ASKED FOR IT. EVERYONE HATES IT"

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 9

"The enrolment of AI in the management of these various crises produces ‘states of exception’ – forms of exclusion that render people vulnerable in an absolute sense". 'Resisting AI' p72 (bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai)

Screenshot of Guardian article
Headline reads "ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony. Under oath, officers said they were told to make eight arrests a day and given special tech to help choose ‘targets’"
Photo shows paramilitary ICE agents outside their base in Portland.

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Apr 2

Boycott Palantir. Boycott AI. Divert all AI investment into democratic planning for more doctors, nurses, care workers and teachers.

Financial Times headline from 2-4-26:
NHS staff boycott Palantir’s data platform over ethical concerns.
Controversial US tech group was awarded a £330mn contract in 2023 to collate hospital and patient information

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Mar 19

Agreed. I applied some ideas from Arendt in 'Resisting AI' e.g. this from p62 (bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai)

Under these conditions, AI
will produce the kind of thoughtlessness that Hannah Arendt
warned us about (Arendt, 2006). Thoughtlessness manifests as
the inability to critique instructions, the lack of reﬂection on
consequences, and a commitment to the belief that the correct
ordering is being carried out. It is the psychopolitical product
of a certain kind of apparatus – of a certain arrangement of
ways of knowing, cultural values and institutional arrangements.
Thoughtlessness enables participants to evade any responsibility
for wider harms.

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Mar 14

"The aspect of AI which sabotages it in social settings, its tendency to generate collateral damage through out-of-distribution errors & so-called hallucinations, ceases to be a problem in conflicts where maximum indiscriminate damage is the actual point" zenodo.org/records/1890...

screenshot of FT headline reading "The AI-driven ‘kill chain’ transforming how the US wages war Systems from Palantir and Anthropic are helping to turn torrents of battlefield data into thousands of strikes" https://www.ft.com/content/fedb262e-e6db-40bc-a4d0-080812f0f82b

Dan McQuillan@danmcquillan· Mar 12

My paper also focuses on AI's overlap with energy & water utilities but points the other way; at reclaiming them as resources for the common good. (Also: abolish AI). zenodo.org/records/1890...