In the LLM of Monsters?

Minds, brains, machines, code, consciousness, labour, class, work, culture, social transformation, dystopia, utopia, annihilation and renewal are the matters for this issue of Arena Quarterly, in our special section on AI, large language models and technology. The gap in much discussion of AI is a lack of consideration of it as a cultural product, originating both from deep drives towards the transcendent in human culture, and a lack of understanding, a taken-for-granted attitude to what culture and human must protect to flourish. John Hinkson considers LLMs and AI as both a continuity with, and break from, revolutions in human social life, and asks whether LLMs now represent an ‘acultural’ form of interchange; Paul Atkinson looks at the way in which the processes of AI undermine the principles necessary to academia and the cultural tradition; Humphrey McQueen and Peter Curtis argue for a cool assessment of claims for AI and labour, in the light of core principles of radical and critical political economics. Tim Strom considers how AI and LLM is produced by and produces, a cyber-capitalism based on new more abstract forms of control; and Guy Rundle looks at the deep cultural and utopian claims from which the drive to AI and LLM draws its energy, the sources on both left and right from which they arise. It’s a fully integrated, searching consideration of the key transforming agent of our time, which goes to the very marrow of what it is to be human, and consequently requires rethinking of radical and human emancipatory approaches to technology.
In a packed issue there’s also Clinton Fernandes, on the US’s long game as regards China, and how Europe is as much a part of that mix as Iran; Michael Dillon, the doyen of indigenous policy analysts, looks behind the headlines to see what keeps failing in policy renewal; Ali Schnabel finds then loses the bird of paradise in the thickets; Gerry Simpson reports on the past and future from international law from Nuremberg; Paddy Gordon considers the successes and deeper failures and self-deceptions of Ruptured, a Melbourne Jewish response to October 7; David Ferraro considers the ways in which different pleasures arise from different capitalism, and vice versa, Jack Hynes examines the AFL’s capacity for self-mythologisation, Matt Bissett-Johnston does a ‘Heath Robinson’ on the Liberal Party, Scott Robinson on drugs – and sport, and human meaning in the enhanced games, Belinda Robson defends the Beyond Blue approach, to mental health assailed by Simon Cooper, Anthony O’Donnell puts a bandage on Australian welfare, Darren Quinn asks private equity where’s our money and super you bastards. It’s capped off by a Dave Mason poem, and Julia Bouros’s extraordinary artwork for our cover. Can you afford not to subscribe to Arena Quarterly?