2026-04-12 –, Salon Language: English
In an earlier recent contribution (Mansouri and Bailey, 2025), we drew on Erik Olin Wright’s (2019) anti-capitalist framework to consider five ‘ways to be anti-AI’: taming AI, resisting AI, dismantling AI, escaping AI and smashing AI. Here, we present a discussion of both the possibilities and potential pitfalls associated with these different pathways towards struggling against AI.
Each path to contesting AI appears to be accompanied by its own pitfalls, ready and waiting to obstruct our attempts to struggle for a world without AI and the harms it is producing. Acts of resistance and escape risk leaving in place the systemic drive for AI to grow and expand across all aspects of society, merely fending off the inevitable, perhaps for just a short period of time. The pursuit of anti-AI objectives through the state - either taming AI, or dismantling it altogether - are themselves at risk of embracing the somewhat naive hope that perhaps the capitalist state might save us. Yet, whilst there are undoubtedly limitations on our ability to struggle against AI, history nevertheless tells us that without struggle the introduction of this next capitalist technology of exploitation and control will be worse than it would be otherwise; and, anyway, and perhaps reassuringly, there is no possibility of a capitalism without opposition. The anti-AI struggle continues.
Masoumeh Iran Mansouri is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.