PERSON
Dan McQuillan
British physicist-turned-social computing scholar whose Resisting AI (2022) applied Barad's framework to machine learning, arguing that AI produces the world it claims to represent.
Dan McQuillan is a lecturer in creative and social computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose background as a physicist (he holds a PhD in experimental particle physics from CERN) informs an unusually rigorous engagement with the technical details of AI systems. His 2022 book Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence provides the most sustained application of Barad's agential realism to contemporary machine learning, arguing that AI systems are not tools that represent the world but apparatuses that produce the world they claim to represent. McQuillan's work has become central to the Baradian interpretation of AI, providing the analytical bridge between Barad's philosophical framework and the specific technical and political realities of contemporary AI deployment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
McQuillan's unusual trajectory — from experimental physics at CERN to community computing with refugees and asylum seekers, then to academic social computing — gives his AI analysis an empirical grounding that purely philosophical treatments often lack. His scholarship consistently insists that AI must be understood not as