Algorithmic Care in the Age of Machine Learning:

This publication reproduces a keynote talk delivered to the Virtual International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, November 7, 2023. This talk brought together technological characteristics of machine learning; associated narratives about their supposed accuracy, their authority, and their inevitability; and speculative fictions that reframe and reimagine AI futures around care, thus challenging AI systems’ worldviews and ever-increasing authority as bestowed by corporations, states, and sectors from education, advertising and marketing, policing, and finance. Thinking with Stephanie Dinkins’ concept of algorithmic care, I analyze fictions that depict AI systems not as objective, neutral, or unbiased, but rather as technologies that are structured by and reproduce oppressive worldviews and discriminatory definitions of the human. In different ways, these stories challenge these harmful worldviews and reframe AI technologies from tools of domination to tools of revolution and liberation, whether from totalizing oppressive technological regimes or from the idea of algorithmic determinism and technological inevitability.