The film’s central conceit, Roher’s impending fatherhood,
immediately reframes a social crisis as a private psychological dilemma.
Instead of examining how AI is reshaping the global economy, intensifying
exploitation, or deepening geopolitical conflict, the documentary invites
viewers to calibrate their feelings about the future through Roher’s personal
journey. This displacement of analysis by affect marks contemporary liberal
documentary filmmaking, which increasingly treats political questions as
matters of personal anxiety rather than collective struggle. The result is a
film that is slick, emotionally resonant, and ideologically hollow.
Roher assembles a collage of opinions from Silicon Valley
executives, futurists, ethicists, and celebrities. The documentary’s
promotional materials describe these voices as “eye-opening,” but the film’s
reliance on tech oligarchs' self-presentation is one of its least enlightening
moves. Asking billionaires whether the future is safe is not an investigation;
it is an abdication of analysis. The people driving AI development- those who
stand to profit from its deployment- are treated as neutral experts rather than
as actors with material interests. Their anxieties, hesitations, and
self-justifications become the substance of the debate, while the structural
forces shaping AI- capital accumulation, military competition, and the search
for new avenues of profit- remain unexamined.
The film’s aesthetic choices reinforce this ideological
sleight of hand. Roher’s signature style- rapid montage, intimate
confessionals, and a swelling score- creates an atmosphere of emotional
urgency. But emotion substitutes for explanation. The viewer is encouraged to
feel overwhelmed, hopeful, frightened, or inspired, without ever being asked to
understand the economic and political dynamics driving AI's explosive growth.
The film’s narrative arc mirrors the therapeutic culture of contemporary
liberalism: anxiety is acknowledged, processed, and soothed, but never
politicised.
The documentary’s failure is not simply one of omission. It
actively reproduces the ideological framework through which the ruling class
seeks to manage public concern about AI. By focusing on individual feelings
rather than collective interests, it obscures the fact that corporations and
states deploy AI to intensify exploitation, discipline labour, and expand
military capabilities. The question millions of people are asking- what does AI
mean for my job, my rights, my future- is displaced by Roher’s question: what
does AI mean for my child’s emotional wellbeing?
The film’s title, with its self-conscious blend of
apocalypse and optimism, encapsulates this ideological manoeuvre. The viewer is
invited to oscillate between fear and hope, between dread and reassurance,
without ever confronting the material conditions that produce those emotions.
The documentary becomes a mood, not an argument.
In the end, The AI Doc is less a reckoning with artificial
intelligence than a symptom of the cultural moment that produced it. It
reflects a political culture that has lost the capacity to think structurally,
that treats social crises as personal dramas, and that looks to the very
architects of technological upheaval for guidance. It is a film for a class
that feels anxious about the future but cannot imagine challenging the forces
that shape it.
The Personalisation of a Social Question
Roher’s impending fatherhood becomes the catalyst for his
inquiry. He wants to know what kind of world his child will inherit. This is a
legitimate concern, shared by millions of workers who face an unprecedented
technological transformation. But the film immediately converts this collective
anxiety into an individual psychological journey. The question is no longer: What
does AI mean for society? But how should one feel about AI? The
answer Roher offers—“apocaloptimism”—is a hybrid of dread and hope, a mood
rather than a theory, and a telling ideological manoeuvre.
The first ideological move displaces social analysis with
emotional calibration. By framing AI as an emotional dilemma, the film avoids
confronting the social relations within which the technology is being
developed. It avoids asking who owns AI, who profits from it, and who it harms.
Instead, it asks how one should respond emotionally to a rapidly changing
world. The viewer is encouraged to oscillate between fear and hope, rather than
to analyse the material forces shaping AI’s trajectory. This oscillation is not
neutral; it is a political act that substitutes affect for critique.
“Apocaloptimism” functions as a class-specific coping
mechanism. It acknowledges danger, permits unease, and then resolves to be
hopeful—because hope is more comfortable than struggle. It is a psychological
balm for a professional class that senses crisis but cannot imagine challenging
the structures that produce it. The film’s emotional arc mirrors this class's
ideological habits: anxiety is recognised, processed, and soothed, but never
politicised. The viewer is asked to manage their feelings, not to interrogate
the system.
This ideological framing has concrete consequences. By
centring Roher’s personal fears, the film erases the collective dimension of
AI’s development. The international working class—the only social force capable
of altering the course of technological change—does not appear in the film’s
frame of reference. Workers are present only as abstract figures who might lose
jobs or face disruption, never as agents capable of shaping the future. The
documentary thus reproduces a familiar liberal narrative: history is made by
individuals with feelings, not by classes with interests.
The film’s choice of interviewees compounds the absence of
class analysis. Roher turns to Silicon Valley executives, futurists, and
ethicists—figures whose perspectives are shaped by their proximity to capital,
not by the experience of exploitation. Their anxieties and hopes become the
film’s emotional palette. But these are not neutral observers. They represent
corporations that stand to profit enormously from AI’s expansion. Their
reassurances, hesitations, and moral reflections serve to naturalise a
technological trajectory driven by competition, profit, and geopolitical
rivalry.
By presenting these voices as part of a balanced debate, the
film obscures the structural forces at work. It treats AI as a phenomenon understood through a collage of opinions rather than through an
examination of capitalism’s need to intensify productivity, reduce labour
costs, and expand surveillance. The documentary’s emotional framing thus
becomes a method of depoliticisation. It transforms a social crisis into a
personal drama, and a political question into a psychological riddle.
“Apocaloptimism” ultimately reveals the film’s ideological
core. It is a mood designed for a class that feels threatened by technological
change but cannot imagine collective resistance. It demands nothing of the
viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no alternative social order,
no democratic control over technology, no worker mobilisation. It is a politics
of feeling in place of a politics of struggle.
In this sense, Roher’s film is not simply inadequate; it is
symptomatic. It reflects a culture in which structural analysis has been
replaced by therapeutic narratives, and in which the future is imagined not as
a terrain of conflict but as an emotional landscape to be navigated. The danger
is acknowledged, the hope is affirmed, and the system remains untouched.
Asking the Oligarchs Whether the Future Is Safe
The film’s interview roster reveals its ideological horizon
with remarkable clarity. Roher turns not to workers, educators, or those whose
lives are already being reshaped by AI, but to the most powerful executives in
Silicon Valley: Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of
Google DeepMind, and Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic. These figures are
not neutral experts. They are the executives of corporations valued in the
hundreds of billions, backed by the largest concentrations of finance capital
in history. Their companies are at the centre of a global technological arms
race, competing for market dominance, military contracts, and geopolitical
advantage. Asking them whether AI will be good for humanity is like asking the
owners of the oil majors whether the climate is in good hands. Their answers
are predictable: AI is dangerous, but manageable; transformative, but
controllable; risky, but ultimately beneficial—provided, of course, that they
are the ones managing it.
The documentary supplements these corporate voices with
researchers and ethicists: Yoshua Bengio, Timnit Gebru, Eliezer Yudkowsky,
Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin. Their perspectives range widely—from labour
exploitation and data colonialism to existential catastrophe and runaway
superintelligence. Yet the film treats them all as “voices” in a debate to be
balanced, rather than evidence to be weighed. The result is a collage of
opinions, not an explanation. The viewer is presented with a spectrum of
viewpoints, but no framework for understanding why these viewpoints exist, how
they relate to one another, or what material interests they express.
This is the hallmark of contemporary liberalism: present
disagreement as pluralism, and pluralism as insight. A documentary that sets
out to explain a phenomenon and ends by presenting a spread of opinions has
explained nothing. It has merely curated a marketplace of ideas, treating every
perspective as interchangeable and none as analysed in relation to the
underlying social structure. The film’s method is to gather voices whose
assessments do not neatly align and to present this dissonance as a virtue. But
disagreement is not analysis. A cacophony of perspectives does not constitute
understanding.
The ideological function of this approach is clear. By
flattening the differences between corporate executives, academic researchers,
and critics of the tech industry, the film obscures the power relations that
shape AI’s development. The executives who stand to profit from AI’s expansion
are placed on the same plane as those who warn of its dangers. The film treats their statements as contributions to a conversation rather than expressions of
class interest. The viewer is encouraged to see the debate as a clash of ideas
rather than as a struggle between competing social forces.
This pluralistic framing also allows the film to avoid
taking a position on the central question: what drives AI development? The
answer is not mysterious. Private corporations are developing AI under intense
market competition and geopolitical rivalry. Its deployment is shaped by the
imperatives of profit, surveillance, and military advantage. But the
documentary’s collage structure prevents these forces from coming into view.
Instead, the viewer is left with a series of personal reflections, anxieties,
and speculations—none of which illuminate the material dynamics at work.
In the end, the film’s interview roster is not simply a list
of participants; it maps its ideological limits. By privileging the voices of
the tech elite and framing their perspectives as part of a balanced debate, the
documentary reproduces the worldview of a class that sees technological change
as a matter of ideas rather than interests. It offers pluralism in place of
analysis, opinion in place of explanation, and emotional resonance in place of
political clarity.
The Absent Subject: The Working Class
The film’s most striking absence is the working class.
Roher’s documentary contains no examination of the labour conditions under
which AI is developed, the global supply chains of data annotation, the
militarisation of machine learning, the geopolitical rivalry between the United
States and China, or the use of AI to cut labour costs and intensify
exploitation. AI is not emerging in a vacuum. It is being developed within
capitalist social relations, under conditions of inter‑imperialist competition,
and in close collaboration with the military‑intelligence apparatus. Its first
large‑scale applications are not in utopian problem‑solving but in automating
managerial control, expanding surveillance, reducing labour costs, and
enhancing targeting systems in warfare.
This omission is not accidental. It reflects the film's
ideological horizon. Roher’s narrative centres on personal anxiety, elite
opinion, and emotional calibration, not on the material processes through which
AI is reshaping global capitalism. The documentary’s defenders often point out
that executives such as Altman, Hassabis, and the Amodeis have publicly called
for slowing “frontier” development. But none of them will do so unilaterally,
because doing so risks falling behind rivals. This is a candid admission that
AI’s trajectory is dictated not by ethics or philosophical reflection, but by
profit and national advantage. The film circles this truth and moves on.
The absence of the working class is particularly glaring
given the scale of transformation already underway. AI systems are trained
through vast, invisible labour forces—data annotators in the Global South
working for subsistence wages, content moderators exposed to traumatic
material, and engineers labouring under intense pressure in hyper‑competitive
corporate environments. These workers do not appear in Roher’s film. Nor does
the militarisation of machine learning appear: the integration of AI into drone
warfare, battlefield logistics, intelligence analysis, and autonomous weapons
development. The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China—one of the
primary drivers of AI investment—is likewise absent. The documentary treats AI
as a technological debate rather than as a terrain of global conflict.
Instead, the film focuses on two categories of risk. The
first is speculative: runaway superintelligence, existential catastrophe, the
familiar tropes of AI apocalypse. The second is reformable: bias,
misinformation, harms to children, ethical design. Both categories are framed
as solvable through regulation, industry self‑restraint, and “humane” design.
These are the risks that Silicon Valley is comfortable discussing, because they
do not threaten the underlying social order. They let executives present
themselves as responsible stewards of a dangerous technology while avoiding confrontation
with the economic imperatives driving AI’s expansion.
Absent from the film is the most immediate and certain
danger: that a technology capable of vastly increasing human productivity will,
under capitalism, be used to throw millions out of work and concentrate wealth
even further in the hands of a tiny elite. This is not hypothetical. It is
already happening. AI is being deployed to automate managerial oversight,
intensify workplace surveillance, and restructure labour processes in ways that
reduce staffing levels and weaken workers’ bargaining power. Productivity gains
accrue to shareholders, not to the people whose jobs are being transformed or
eliminated.
The problem, in other words, is not the machine. It is who
owns it and to what end. Roher’s documentary cannot confront this question
because it is structurally incapable of doing so. Its emotional framing, its
reliance on elite voices, and its refusal to analyse the social relations of AI
development all serve to depoliticise a profoundly political phenomenon. The
result is a film that gestures toward danger, acknowledges anxiety, and then
retreats into therapeutic reassurance—leaving the real dynamics of AI power
untouched.
“Apocaloptimism” as Ideology
The term “apocaloptimism” deserves scrutiny because
it crystallises the ideological core of Roher’s documentary. It is presented as
a mature emotional stance—acknowledge danger, feel the requisite unease, and
then resolve to be hopeful. But this posture is not politically neutral. It is
a quintessentially upper‑middle‑class response to crisis, shaped by a social
stratum that senses instability yet cannot imagine collective struggle or
systemic transformation. “Apocaloptimism” demands nothing of the viewer except
emotional calibration. It proposes no social force capable of altering the
course of events, because the only force that could—the international working
class—does not appear anywhere in the film’s frame of reference.
The documentary’s emotional arc thus substitutes for
political analysis. Roher’s impending fatherhood becomes the structuring device
through which the film interprets the future. His personal anxiety is treated
as a universal experience, and the viewer is invited to identify with his
oscillation between dread and hope. This emotional oscillation is the film’s
method: it acknowledges crisis, gestures toward catastrophe, and then retreats
into reassurance. The danger is real, but the response is affective rather than
analytical. The viewer is asked to feel their way through the problem,
not to understand it.
This emotional framing is not incidental. It reflects the
ideological habits of a class that experiences precarity but lacks a political
vocabulary for confronting it. The professional‑managerial class, whose members
dominate the documentary’s imagined audience, is caught between capital's power
and the insecurity of technological change. They fear downward mobility, job
displacement, and the erosion of their social status. Yet they cannot conceive
of collective struggle, because their worldview is shaped by individualism,
meritocracy, and the belief that social problems are best addressed through
personal reflection or ethical consumption. “Apocaloptimism” is the emotional
ideology of this class: a way of managing anxiety without confronting its
structural causes.
The film’s reliance on elite voices reinforces this dynamic.
By centring Silicon Valley executives, futurists, and ethicists, Roher
constructs a narrative in which the future is shaped by individuals' insights
and decisions rather than by conflict between social classes. The international
working class—the only force capable of democratically shaping technological
development—remains invisible. Workers appear only as potential victims of
automation or as abstract figures in discussions of “labour disruption.” The
film never depicts them as agents with interests, capacities, or political
power. This erasure is essential to the film’s emotional logic. If the working
class were present, the viewer would confront the possibility of struggle
rather than the necessity of hope.
“Apocaloptimism” also functions as a mechanism of
depoliticisation. By framing AI as an emotional dilemma, the film avoids asking
who owns the technology, who profits from it, and who it harms. It avoids
examining the capitalist imperatives—competition, profit maximisation, and
geopolitical rivalry—that drive AI’s development. Instead, it encourages
viewers to adopt a mood that is neither fully pessimistic nor fully optimistic.
This mood mirrors the ideological confusion of a class that senses crisis but
cannot imagine alternatives.
Historiographical Context: Technology, Capital, and Class
Power
Marx’s Grundrisse and Braverman’s Labour and
Monopoly Capital provide the essential theoretical foundation that Roher’s documentary lacks. In the Marxist tradition, technology is never treated as
an autonomous force or a morally ambiguous phenomenon floating above society.
It is analysed as a moment within the social relations of production. Machines
do not liberate or enslave on their own; they are instruments of class power.
Their effects depend entirely on the social system into which they are
introduced. Under capitalism, technological innovation is inseparable from the
drive to reduce socially necessary labour time, extract surplus value,
intensify managerial control, and compete globally between capitals. These
dynamics shape not only the development of AI but its deployment, its risks,
and its social meaning.
Roher’s documentary belongs to a long lineage of liberal
technological discourse that treats technology as autonomous, neutral, or
morally ambiguous. In this tradition, machines appear as independent actors,
capable of reshaping society according to their own internal logic. The social
relations of production—the ownership of technology, the imperatives of profit,
the organisation of labour, the pressures of competition—are displaced by
narratives of innovation, creativity, and ethical responsibility. The result is
a historiographical distortion: technology is framed as a psychological dilemma
rather than as a weapon in capital’s hands.
This distortion is central to the film’s ideological
function. By presenting AI as a force that might be dangerous or beneficial
depending on how individuals feel about it, Roher obscures the class character
of technological development. The documentary’s emotional framing—its
oscillation between dread and hope, its emphasis on personal anxiety, its
therapeutic narrative arc—serves to depoliticise a profoundly political
phenomenon. AI becomes a matter of mood rather than of power.
The Marxist tradition insists on the opposite. Under
capitalism, technology is developed to increase productivity, reduce labour
costs, and intensify control over workers. Market competition and geopolitical
rivalry between states shape it. AI is no exception. Its most immediate
applications are not in solving global problems or enhancing human flourishing
but in automating managerial oversight, expanding surveillance, restructuring
labour processes, and enhancing military capabilities. These uses are not
accidental; they follow directly from the imperatives of capital accumulation
and state power.
Roher’s documentary cannot confront these dynamics because
it rests on liberal assumptions. It treats AI as a neutral tool whose dangers
arise from misuse or insufficient regulation. It frames risk in terms of
speculative catastrophe or reformable harm—runaway superintelligence, bias,
misinformation, ethical design—while ignoring the most certain and immediate
danger: that AI will be used to throw millions out of work and concentrate
wealth even further in the hands of a tiny elite. This is not a hypothetical.
It is already happening. AI systems are being deployed to intensify
exploitation, weaken labour bargaining power, and expand managerial control.
Productivity gains accrue to shareholders, not workers.
By refusing to analyse these dynamics, the documentary
performs a historiographical sleight of hand. It replaces political economy
with personal emotion, class struggle with psychological calibration, and
structural analysis with a collage of elite opinions. In doing so, it
reproduces the ideological worldview of a class that senses crisis but cannot
imagine alternatives. The problem, in the end, is not the machine. It is who
owns it, who controls it, and what end it is deployed to. Roher’s film cannot
say this, because to do so would require abandoning “apocaloptimism” and
confronting the reality of class power.
The Real Question: Who Owns the Means of Computation?
Roher and Kwan are undeniably talented filmmakers. The AI
Doc is polished, emotionally resonant, and crafted with the narrative
intimacy that has become a hallmark of contemporary liberal documentary style.
A parent’s fear for a child’s future is real, and Roher’s framing taps into a
widespread and legitimate anxiety. But the answer to that fear does not lie in
the reassurances of billionaires or the moral exhortations of Silicon Valley’s
in‑house critics. The film’s emotional power cannot compensate for its
political evasions, and its aesthetic sophistication ultimately obscures the
social forces shaping AI rather than illuminating them.
The documentary’s central conceit—Roher’s impending
fatherhood—creates a narrative structure that is affectively compelling but
politically disabling. It transforms a collective crisis into a private
dilemma, a social question into a psychological journey. The viewer is invited
to empathise with Roher’s oscillation between dread and hope, but not to
interrogate the material conditions producing those emotions. This is the
ideological function of the film’s emotional arc: it substitutes personal
feeling for political analysis, and therapeutic reassurance for structural
critique.
The absence of the working class is decisive. AI is the
product of global labour: data annotators in Kenya and the Philippines,
warehouse workers monitored by algorithmic systems, engineers labouring under
intense corporate pressure, and millions whose jobs are being restructured or
eliminated. Yet none of these people appears in the film. Their absence is not
merely an oversight; it reflects the film’s class perspective. By centring
elite voices—Altman, Hassabis, the Amodeis—the documentary reproduces the
worldview of a class that sees technological change as a matter of ideas,
ethics, and personal responsibility rather than as a terrain of class struggle.
The film’s defenders often praise its “balanced” roster of
interviewees, from corporate executives to ethicists and critics. But this
pluralism is itself ideological. It treats perspectives shaped by vast
concentrations of capital as equivalent to those shaped by research, activism,
or existential speculation. It presents disagreement as insight, and insight as
explanation. The result is a collage of opinions that never confronts the
underlying social relations driving AI’s development: the imperatives of profit,
the pressures of inter‑imperialist rivalry, and the integration of machine
learning into military and surveillance infrastructures.
Against this backdrop, the film’s emotional
resolution—“apocaloptimism”—functions as a class‑specific coping mechanism. It
acknowledges danger, permits unease, and then resolves to be hopeful. But hope,
in this formulation, is not a political orientation; it is a psychological
balm. It demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It
proposes no collective force capable of altering the course of technological
development, because the only force that could—the international working
class—has been excluded from the narrative.
A Marxist analysis points elsewhere. From
Marx’s Grundrisse to Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital, the
tradition has consistently shown that technology is not autonomous. Social
relations of production shape it. Under capitalism, technological innovation is
inseparable from the drive to reduce socially necessary labour time, extract
surplus value, intensify managerial control, and outcompete rivals. AI is not
an exception; it is a paradigmatic expression of these dynamics.
The answer to a parent’s fear for a child’s future does not
lie in billionaires' reassurances or Silicon Valley critics' moral exhortations. It lies in placing this extraordinary technology—the product
of the collective labour and knowledge of generations—under democratic, public
control, and directing it toward social need rather than private profit. Only
then can AI become a tool for human liberation rather than another instrument
of capitalist domination.
On AI, Labour, and Capital
- Shoshana
Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an
Information Civilisation” (Journal of Information Technology,
2015) — foundational analysis of data extraction as a new frontier of
capital.
- Kate
Crawford & Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System” (2018) — maps
the global labour, resource extraction, and logistics behind Amazon’s
Alexa; indispensable for showing AI as a material system.
- Aaron
Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work” (New Left Review,
2019) — argues that automation is driven by stagnation and competition,
not technological inevitability.
- Sarah
T. Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Labourers’ Dirty Work”
(Media Studies, 2016) — exposes the hidden labour behind AI
training and moderation.
- Meredith
Whittaker, “The Steep Cost of Capture: How the Tech Industry Co‑opts AI
Ethics” (AI Now Institute, 2020) — crucial for understanding
why corporate “ethics” discourse depoliticises AI.
On Silicon Valley Ideology
- Evgeny
Morozov, “The Taming of Tech Criticism” (The Baffler, 2014) —
explains how liberal tech discourse neutralises structural critique.
- Fred
Turner, “Machine Politics: The Rise of the Political Entrepreneur” (Harvard
Kennedy School Review, 2018) — situates Silicon Valley’s worldview
within American managerial liberalism.
- Jathan
Sadowski, “When Data is Capital” (Big Data & Society, 2019)
— argues that data extraction is a new form of capital accumulation.
On AI, Militarisation, and Geopolitics
- Paul
Scharre, “Killer Apps: The Real Dangers of AI in Warfare” (Foreign
Affairs, 2023) — mainstream but useful for mapping military
integration.
- Lindsay
Cohn, “AI and the New Military Revolution” (Parameters, 2022) —
outlines how machine learning is transforming command and control.
- Elsa
Kania, “AI and China’s Military Strategy” (Center for a New
American Security, 2019) — essential for understanding US–China
rivalry.
On Marxism, Technology, and Social Relations
- Harry
Braverman, “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century” (Monthly
Review, 1974) — classic analysis of managerial control and deskilling.
- David
Harvey, “The Technological Fix” (A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
2005) — situates technological innovation within neoliberal restructuring.
- Nick
Dyer‑Witheford, “Cyber‑Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex”
(Monthly Review Press, 2015) — indispensable for a Marxist analysis
of digital capitalism.
📖 Bibliography (Marxist,
Critical Theory, Labour Studies, AI Critique)
Marxist Foundations
- Karl
Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58) — especially the “Fragment on Machines.”
- Karl
Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867) — chapters on machinery, large‑scale
industry, and relative surplus value.
- Friedrich
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
- Harry
Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974).
- Ernest
Mandel, Late Capitalism (1975) — on technological innovation and
competition.
- David
Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010).
Technology, Capitalism, and Labour
- Nick
Dyer‑Witheford, Cyber‑Proletariat (2015).
- Ursula
Huws, Labour in the Global Digital Economy (2014).
- Shoshana
Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).
- Aaron
Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (2020).
- Sarah
T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of
Social Media (2019).
- Kate
Crawford, Atlas of AI (2021).
AI, Ethics, and Ideology
- Meredith
Whittaker, The AI Industry and Its Ethics Problem (AI Now, 2020).
- Timnit
Gebru et al., “Datasheets for Datasets” (2018).
- Ruha
Benjamin, Race After Technology (2019).
- Safiya
Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018).
- Evgeny
Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).
Geopolitics, Militarisation, and Imperialism
- Paul
Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
(2018).
- Elsa
Kania, Battlefield Singularity: China’s Military AI Strategy
(2017).
- Michael
Klare, The Race for What’s Left (2012) — resource extraction and
global competition.
- John
Bellamy Foster, The New Imperialism of Global Capital (Monthly
Review, various essays).
Documentary, Liberalism, and Political Affect
- Thomas
Frank, Listen, Liberal (2016) — on the professional‑managerial
class.
- Lauren
Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011) — essential for analysing affect as
ideology.
