AI Futures - Reading group
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AI Futures is an agile reading group and an incubator for a learning community — a space to explore recent, especially relevant texts and think collectively about how artificial intelligence is transforming everyday life, work, culture, democracy, and the use of resources.
In a hyper-accelerated context where AI tends to shut down debate under the promise of efficiency, reading together becomes a real alternative to technological acceleration and the delegation of judgment, criteria, and responsibility. We are reading in order to understand — and, possibly, to act.
Schedule
Biweekly online sessions:
Tuesday 6/10, 18.30
Tuesday 20/10, 18.30
Tuesday 3/11, 18.30
Tuesday 10/11, 18.30
Saturday 28/11, in-person presentation session as part of the OpenLAB festival
Participants based in Madrid may meet in person at Medialab Matadero (by prior notice to proyectoslab@medialab-matadero.es at least 3–4 working days in advance).
Registration
Participation in each session is free and open, with no prior registration required.
Why a reading group? For whom?
In a context of technological acceleration and promises of efficiency, reading together is a way of pausing. Here, reading becomes a civic infrastructure: a space to recognize the ideologies, metaphors, and power relations that already organize the public sphere, culture, and labour through algorithmic systems.
No technical knowledge or expert standing is required. The group is open to artists, people from the cultural, educational, and social fields, and anyone interested in understanding and debating the role of AI in shared life. We want to build a community capable of asking uncomfortable questions, sharing critical tools, and imagining other possible relationships with technology.
In keeping with Medialab Matadero's tradition, this Research Unit (RU) understands reading as a public practice and community as a framework for collective learning.
What are we reading?
We believe that engaging with how these systems actually work, and understanding their logical, philosophical, economic, and cultural foundations, should be essential literacy for any 21st-century citizen. That's why each session takes a book as a shared starting point. Building on the author's ideas, we want to discuss recent information, news, and data. We are not looking for closed answers, but rather to build a solid, shared body of knowledge — one grounded in first-hand information and reflection on grey areas, challenges, opportunities, and alternative paradigms.
Each session poses specific questions or themes as a starting point.
1. Power, infrastructures, and autonomy
Suggested minimum reading: the full book (as far as each person can get)
Does AI necessarily require large corporations, data concentration, and massive resource consumption? What forms of labour, knowledge, and care are rendered invisible when we speak of "automation"? Is there a single idea of "artificial general intelligence," or several competing ones? Why might the one promoted by a company like OpenAI not be the only possible one? Who benefits from this narrative? What kind of AI enables, or could enable, personal autonomy, collective self-management, and decentralization?
2. Hype, economy, and culture
Suggested minimum reading: the full book (it's short)
To what extent is today's AI industry, more than a technological revolution, a massive financial operation applied to key infrastructures? Is this different from what happened in earlier eras with other technologies (cars, television, aviation, satellites)? What role do hype and trends play in the common understanding of AI and in its own technical development? What does it mean for a technology to be "inevitable," and who benefits from us understanding it that way? When does a tool extend us, and when does it turn us into an appendage or assistant of a machine?
3. Intelligence, evolution, and computation
Suggested minimum reading: introduction and one chapter of your choice → available at https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/
What ideas about the mind, evolution, and life are inscribed in AI systems? What are the social consequences of treating intelligence as something measurable, comparable, and optimizable? Is computation a form of intelligence? Who benefits from these approaches? What kind of world do they design? What is intelligence for Google?
4. Geopolitics and plural futures
Suggested minimum reading: introduction and one chapter of your choice
Are there technologies necessarily bound to specific cultures or cosmologies? Is there a Western AI culture and a Chinese one, or rather a single planetary AI culture? What are the risks of thinking of Europe, China, and the United States as homogeneous technological blocs? Does it make sense to fight for a "European AI"?