Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/11/2025
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Categories
Register here.
Description
AI technologies, the newest stage of digital evolution, are being rapidly integrated into existing systems of extraction and domination, with plans underway to increase the speed and scale of these projects. This comes as human and ecological systems are already being stressed and shattered by existing technologies as well as emboldened projects of authoritarian fascism. We stand at a crucial point where demystifying AI and its impact is paramount for the fight for democracy and life.
Dr. Nicholas Rabb will explain the nuances of AI technology – what it can and cannot do – and its interaction with existing social systems. Drawing on emerging declarations from U.S. military bodies, as well as recent AI-powered military operations in Palestine and against U.S. immigrants, he will illuminate the consequences of current and future projects where AI is being used to advance human and ecological suffering. But perhaps more importantly, Rabb will make clear how AI is just another tool in service of old and persistent aims – capitalist growth, international control, domestic compliance – and that these sites of struggle should remain our focus even in the coming AI era.
Bio
Nicholas Rabb is a scholar, educator, and movement leader working at the intersection of technology, ethics, and social change. With a PhD in computer science and cognitive science specializing in misinformation studies, Rabb has published academic research, spoken at major conferences in the US and internationally, and developed pioneering academic courses illuminating the politics of emerging technologies like AI and their role in maintaining social control and the political status quo.
Beyond academia, Rabb has played key leadership roles in social justice movements, shaping national conversations on peace, climate, and disarmament. As a leader within the Sunrise Movement, Dissenters, and Massachusetts Peace Action, he has spearheaded political education, organizing, strategizing, and community mobilization initiatives at local and national levels. His leadership continues as a board member of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security.
He is currently working on a book titled The Domination Crisis: How the Shared Roots of Militarism and the Climate Crisis are Shaping Our Planet’s Future, which explores the ways that dominating, militaristic culture and the climate crisis are fueling one another, and leading us to politics of authoritarianism and control.
1 Comment
You may be interested in my essay: “Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism” (available on my website).
From there: “There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those “security” agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else… Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. …
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful and capable of causing so much destruction if misused]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.”