Building a Solidarity Ecosystem for AI

Trebor Scholz and Mark Esposito provide guidance for building community-owned alternatives to extractive AI systems, arguing that such an intervention is the only way to prevent extractive logics being scaled globally and concentrating power in the hands of the technological elite. "A democratic AI cannot simply rent space on the extraction stack. It requires that workers, communities, cooperatives, and public institutions reclaim ownership of the infrastructure itself, layer by layer, from the earth to the cloud. The solidarity stack also rejects the notion of artificial intelligence, which implies a magical, autonomous force, and reframes it as collective intelligence, acknowledging the human labor and communal knowledge that power these systems." Read more from the Stanford Social Innovation Review.