‘Yet Another Machine For Producing Gods’
Image: UBahn station in Essen, Germany, artwork by anonymous students at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste, 2026
Time: Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00 pm UK time.
Venue: online
About the seminar
CPCT’s annual research seminar meets on a bi-weekly basis and is open to centre members, graduate affiliates, and other interested staff and students as well as the general public. It aims to serve as a forum for philosophical work and dialogue at Goldsmiths.
Taking inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s Glas, in which Hegel and Genet face off in two columns, typeset to produce mutual provocation with and against one another so as to invite interrogation of their respective presuppositions and predilections, this year’s seminar will read a selection of technical documents on AI alongside philosophies of science and technology, language, knowledge, action, and materialism from the critical tradition. Alongside (re-)introducing participants to key documents in the evolution and consolidation of issues that are currently live in AI research—(i) functionality; (ii) scale; (iii) language; (iv) emergence / “intelligence”; (v) agency; and (vi) energy—the sessions will (re-)read critical theoretical explorations of technical dysfunction, the power matrices that become legible through technology’s gaps and blind spots, what happens when language only points at itself, the real and the possible, thinking with tools, and consumption. Throughout, the seminar will be guided by two goals: to demystify the rhetoric and occulted force of technical thinking by interrogating its conceptual premises and poetic machinations; and to invite critical philosophy’s own fundamental revision in view of the machinery of technical fabulation today.
Convened by the Critical AI Network organising collective: Dan McQuillan, Julia Ng, Scott Wark, Deirdre Daly, Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, and Jenny Doussan.
A detailed session plan including links to readings can be found here.
This year’s sessions will be online; to participate, please register at the link at the top of the detailed session plan. Free and open to the public.
OVERVIEW
Subtopic: AI Does Not Work
14 October 2026 — Song et al., “Evaluating large language models in scientific discovery”; Sohn-Rethel, “The Ideal of the Broken-Down”; Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”; Bloch, “Italy and Porosity” [Julia Ng]
28 October 2026 — Rabanser et al, ‘Towards a science of AI agent reliability’; Marx, ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’; Reinfelder, ‘Breaking the Spell of Technicism’; Bahr, ‘The Class Structure of Machinery’ [Andrés Saenz de Sicilia]
Subtopic: Scale
11 November 2026 — Epoch AI, Scaling Intelligence; Bowman, ‘Eight things to know about large language models’; Jünger, ‘Total Mobilization’ [Dan McQuillan]
25 November 2026 — Hanna and Park, ‘Against Scale: Provocations and Resistances to Scale Thinking’; Serres, The Parasite [Scott Wark]
9 December 2026 — Sutton, ‘The Bitter Lesson’; Muldoon and Wu, ‘Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power’; Dussel, ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’ [Svenja Bromberg and Andrés Saenz de Sicilia]
Subtopic: Babble
13 January 2027 — Bender et al, ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots’; Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’ [Deirdre Daly]
27 January 2027 — Borg, ‘LLMs, Turing tests and Chinese rooms’; Benjamin, ‘Notes on ‘Objective Mendacity’’ and ‘Notes toward a Work on Lying’; Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’ [Julia Ng]
10 February 2027 — Wei et al, ‘Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models’; Agamben, The Body of Language and What I Saw, heard, learned [Jenny Doussan]
Subtopic: Counter-Intelligence
3 March 2027 — Bubeck et al, ‘Sparks of artificial general intelligence’; Agamben, The Unrealizable [Jenny Doussan]
Subtopic: Agency
17 March 2027 — OpenAI, ‘The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead’; Greenblatt et al, ‘‘Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident’; Anders, ‘On Promethean Shame’ and ‘Theses for the Atomic Age’ [Andrés Saenz de Sicilia]
21 April 2027 — Barla, What Are Agentic LLMs?; de Macedo, ‘What makes a harness a harness: necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent harness’; Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?; Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’ and ‘The Word Processor’ [Julia Ng]
5 May 2027 — Vaswani et al, ‘Attention Is All You Need’; Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects [Scott Wark]
Subtopic: Energy
19 May 2027 — Oviedo et al, ‘Energy Use of AI Inference, Efficiency Pathways, and Test-Time Scaling’; Stiegler, ‘What is Called Caring? Vol. 1: The Immense Regression [Deirdre Daly]
2 June 2027 — Pandey et al, ‘How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive’; Cherian et al, ‘Global AI stocks fall as industry chiefs call for slowing development’; Stengers, Cosmopolitics I [Dan McQuillan]
