Artificial Intelligence poses a major threat to human civilization. It is taking away jobs and being used for surveillance/incarceration, it is destroying the environment with polluting data centers. It is mixing fact with disinformation and taking away foundational skills needed for human critical thinking. Even some Big Tech leaders have admitted that AI could result in catastrophic consequences.
Northeast Los Angeles Alliance for Democracy invites you to a four-part webinar series to address these concerns and offer ideas for resistance and action.
Session I: AI and Labor | Wednesday July 29 @ 6 p.m.
AI is cutting jobs on a massive scale and either not replacing them or replacing them with lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs. AI increases the intensity of the surveillance of every movement of the body to increase speed, which also increases injuries. State capitalism offers Big Tech monopolies tax cuts, subsidies, and deregulation to thwart labor organizing. How are workers from the Amazon Labor Union, National Nurses United, and the film industry responding?
Speakers: James Saccardo, Amazon Labor Union-International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1 member, political director, and organizer Lee Barker, National Nurses United Organizing Committee Harold Moss, Emmy award-winning animation producer Moderator: Frieda Afary, Librarian and Author
Session II: AI and the Environment | Wednesday, August 5 @ 6 p.m. PT
AI’s massive use of energy and water, its polluting effects, and its intensification of the climate crisis make it an existential danger. The data centers on which AI relies threaten our communities with air pollution, constant noise, water quality degradation, and higher electricity and water rates. Learn about the resistance to data centers.
Speakers: Dr. Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida, Union of Concerned Scientists Bill Kelly, Environmental Journalist, author of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Los Angeles and The People's Republic of Chemicals.
Session III: AI and Education | Wednesday, August 12, 2026 @ 6 p.m. PT
AI is taking away our ability to analyze and critically comprehend what we read. It is reducing us to passive recipients of information. What are AI’s short-term and long-term risks to education and critical thinking? How are educators, students, and parents responding to these challenges?
Speakers: Nick Rabb, Postdoctoral researcher at California State University, Los Angeles, researching AI in education, and methods of institutional change in higher education Frieda Afary, Public Librarian and Author D.P. Snyder, Writer, Poet, Critic, and Literary Translator from Spanish
Session IV: AI and Surveillance/Incarceration | Wednesday August 26 @6 p.m. PT
AI started as a military technology. Big Tech companies like Palantir are designing the mechanics of mass deportation by ICE. At the local police level, AI is being used to integrate data from a growing number of sources to create instant dossiers on people. AI is facilitating a centralized fascist state with a powerful surveillance, police, and prison system to dominate and exploit humans. How are activists responding to these developments?
Speaker: Ray Acheson, author and activist who connects transnational and local efforts against militarism, the carceral system, borders, and other forms of state violence.
To read a brochure on AI published by the NELA Alliance for Democracy, click on this link: https://www.nelafordemocracy.org/resources
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