ABSTRACT
In an article for Real Life Magazine, queer researcher Os Keyes (2019) argues that the epistemologies of Big Data and the operations of artificial intelligence (AI) are incompatible with queerness, for they tend to eliminate the fluidity of identities and queer subject positions in favour of clearly defined categories and universally valid taxonomies. Against this backdrop I ask what it would take for queerness to become “technological, operational, and systemic” (Barnett et al., 2016). I examine some of the selective inclusions and exclusions that undergird the operations of artificial intelligence and manifest the media theory of contemporary AI. Specifically, I elaborate on the function of autistic subjectivity and cognition in the context of AI: while autistic cognition functions as a constitutive Other in fantasies of future AI, autistic individuals have been and continue to be an essential part of the cognitive infrastructure of real-world AI—not despite, but because of the purportedly fixed autistic subjectivities and specific cognitive (in)capabilities that contrast imaginaries of post-anthropocentric intelligence. Yet, the significance of autistic cognition and subjectivity in the operations and media theory of AI also promises openings. Neuroqueerness is a performative response to the selective inclusions and exclusions to which autistic individuals are subjected to in social contexts. This chapter attempts to make this performative engagement with the discriminated identity fruitful for a response to media theories of contemporary AI.
