A New AI Lexicon: Pleasures

Social scientists amply document algorithmic harms and algorithmic bias, such as discrimination in hiring, medical settings, or the criminal justice system, and for good reason -- these systems produce wide effects and are deployed on a massive scale. Yet there is less attention on how different forms of pleasure, affect, and desire produce and drive both normative and renegade repurposings of these systems. Pleasure, or pleasures, which I take to encompass the expressive life, range of feelings, affective charges routed through technical systems, and the systems of drives that animate social, ecological, and technical worlds, needs to be thought of as an essential, and not always positive, aspect of our technological systems. As AI systems develop and critiques of these systems mount, we will have to come to terms with the following realities: First, forms of desire for control, power, knowledge, and progress gave rise to techno-solutionism in the first place, and repudiating those forms will require cultivating other modes of pleasure. The belief that the problems produced by algorithms can be solved by ever newer forms of technology is deep-seeded and seated in a heady mixture of (white) male cultural norms, ideas about progress that treat those on the receiving end of technological harms as'backward,' and colonial norms that separate out a particular technology from the larger environmental, economic, social, and cultural contexts in which they unfold (Ricaurte 2019, Ullman 2017, Broussard 2018, Forsythe 2001, Heyward-Rotimi 2021).