Abstract:
Neoliberalism has become orthodoxy in the present, erasing competing paradigms and alternative imaginings. Chile’s radical Cybersyn project from 1971 to 1973 offers a departure point for an alternative path, albeit one that was abruptly and violently extinguished. We revisit this moment by fine-tuning AI language models on the words and writing of Salvador Allende, the Chilean President, and Stafford Beer, the cyberneticist who helped to design the project. We conduct interviews with these simulated personas, focusing on how their revolutionary ideas might be taken up in the present. We then use an AI model to generate five-year-plans from 1973 to the present, simulating an alternate history guided by Cybersyn and a progressive agenda. We frame these interventions as socialist infrastructuring that cultivates a more expansive socialist imagining. This work is not about the viability of planned economies, but about the ‘inspirability’ of exploring other value-systems in the present, allowing us to break out of our future-on-rails to envision alternative ways of organizing economy and society.
Article Title:
Other Worlds: Using AI to Revisit Cybersyn and Rethink Economic Futures
Authors:
Luke Munn, Liam Magee
Language:
English
Link:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05992
Access:
Open-Access
Authors’ Bios:
Luke Munn is a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures & Societies at the University of Queensland. His wide-ranging work investigates the sociocultural impacts of digital cultures, from data infrastructures in Asia to platform labor and far-right radicalisation, and has been featured in highly regarded journals such as Cultural Politics, Big Data & Society, and New Media & Society as well as popular forums like the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. He has written five books: Unmaking the Algorithm (2018), Logic of Feeling (2020), Automation is a Myth (2022), Countering the Cloud (2022), and Technical Territories (2023 forthcoming). His work combines diverse digital methods with critical analysis that draws on media, race, and cultural studies.
Associate Professor Liam Magee is Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Liam is an Associate Investigator at the Western Sydney University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Encompassing digital, media and urban studies, his research examines how digital technologies reshape conditions of knowledge, social relations and cultural form. His books include Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research and Interwoven Cities. He has co-authored articles for Futures; Information, Communication & Society; Big Data & Society; Geoforum; and First Monday. His current research investigates how AI works across different scales of human subjectivity, social stratification and geopolitical organisation. He has contributed to studies of intersectional bias and cultural understandings of AI, and techniques for analysing AI via interviews, media analysis and code experiments. He is working on three ARC projects: Enabling Disability: Autonomous Technologies & CaLD persons with disability; The Geopolitics of Automation; and To Map and Enhance Australian Musical Improvisation as a Creative Industry.
Additional Info:
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