[3][4] McQuillan uses the expression "AI violence" to describe how – based on opaque algorithms – various actors can discriminate against categories of people in accessing jobs, loans, medical care, and other benefits.
[5] The analysis of McQuillan goes beyond the known critique of AI systems fostering precarious labour markets, addressing "necropolitics", the politics of who is entitled to live, and who to die.
[2][6] Although McQuillan offers a brief history of machine learning at the beginning of the book – with its need for "hidden and undercompensated labour",[6] he is concerned more with the social impacts of AI rather than with its technical aspects.
An example of a scenario where AI systems of surveillance could bring discrimination to a new high is the initiative to create LGBT-free zones in Poland.
[7] A chapter titled "Post-Machine Learning" makes an appeal for resistance via currents of thought from feminist science (standpoint theory), post-normal science (extended peer communities), and new materialism; McQuillan encourages the reader to question the meaning of "objectivity" and calls for the necessity of alternative ways of knowing.