Technology Category
Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Jobs/LaborHumans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human ComputationApplication Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
Resisting AI Solutionism through Workplace Collective Action
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the growing technodeterminism surrounding AI in higher education and the associated governance crisis precipitated by narratives of AI-driven labor displacement. Beginning in Fall 2024, the project employed a participatory organizing strategy to convene librarians, faculty, staff, and students across institutional divisions, establishing a sustained grassroots coalition that hosts regular collective action spaces and public deliberative forums—systematically centering labor perspectives within AI governance agendas. Its key contributions are twofold: first, it pioneers the application of socio-technical approaches—namely democratic dialogue, collaborative inquiry, and collective decision-making—to enact “technological resistance” within academia, thereby challenging technocentric discourse hegemony; second, it successfully incubated a durable, cross-sectoral campus organizing network, yielding a scalable, institutionalized framework for countering AI solutionism through collective agency. This work provides empirically grounded pathways and theoretical insights for democratizing AI governance in higher education.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 Abstract
In the face of increasing austerity and threats of AI-enabled labor replacement at the University of Michigan, a group of workers and students have coalesced around the project of "AI resistance" since Fall 2024. Forming a cross-departmental coalition including librarians, faculty, staff, graduate workers, and undergraduate students, we have hosted a public workshop questioning the techno-deterministic inevitability of AI use at the University and are working with other campus organizations to maintain an ongoing organizing space. This workshop submission incorporates our reflections thus far on the strategies we've employed, the challenges to collective resistance, and our role as workers in resisting AI within the University. Our aim for this work is to provide concrete inspiration for technologists, students, and staff looking to resist AI techno-solutionism within their own universities.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Resisting AI-driven labor replacement in universities
Challenging techno-deterministic views on AI adoption
Building collective action against AI solutionism
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Cross-departmental coalition resists AI replacement
Public workshop challenges AI techno-determinism
Ongoing organizing space for collective resistance
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