Keynote by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell at Cambridge University on April 8th.: The Smartness Mandate” AI and the Digital Series Leverhulme Center

Cambridge Digital Humanities has joined forces with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) and Gloknos at Cambridge, and the Center for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn and the Stiftung Mercator in Germany to co-sponsor a brand new seminar series exploring how AI and other digital technologies are influenced by concepts of the human and how they can be designed to be responsible, socially just, and ecologically sustainable.

AI and the Digital is organised and hosted by Dr Audrey Borowski, Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Thought in Bonn, Associate Member of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge and CDH Associate. Together with international experts, participants are invited to discuss the entanglement of thought and technology.

The seminar series is hosted and live streamed by The Philosopher on Zoom on the following Mondays:

April 

Monday 8th | Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell 

The Smartness Mandate  

Smart Grids. Smart Cities. Smart phones. Smart Medicine. Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and ‘crisis’. The penetration of almost every part of life by digital technologies has transformed how we understand nature, culture, and time. But how? And for whom? What futures are we imagining, or foreclosing, through our ‘smart’ infrastructures?

This conversation will historically and ethnographically situate this new mandate to be smart and discuss how the humanities and sciences can work together to develop technologies that engage planetary scale problems in more ethical, just, and diverse ways.

Register here

May 

Monday 6th | Leif Weatherby 

Capture and Generate: The New Language of AI 

What we mean by the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ changes from decade to decade and year to year. The rise of ‘generative AI’ has added language to the definition, and not only because chatbots have been the public face of AI for the last year. This talk will analyse the Transformer Architecture and the language that makes it work, arguing that literary theory – in an updated version – is required to make sense of data culture today.

Register here

Monday 13th | Katherine Hayles 

Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts 

Monday 27th | Matteo Pasquinelli 

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence 

June 

Monday 3rd | Lorraine Daston 

Rules and Algorithms 

Monday 10th | Sherry Turkle 

Who Do We Become When We Talk to Machines? 

Monday 17th | Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones 

A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms

For more information please visit: www.desirableai.com/events/ai-and-the-digital-1