Keynote Talk by Orit Halpern @DesCartes Humanities & Social Sciences Forum 2026 Singapore

The Work That Makes The Machine: 
A Symposium on the People and Production of Artificial Intelligence

In Laboratory Life, an ethnography of a neuroendocrinology laboratory, Bruno Latour and Steve
Woolgar characterised scientists as a “strange tribe who spend the greatest part of their day
coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing” (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). They
portrayed these scientists as viewing their work untouched by belief, culture, and other
mediations. Whether reductive or insightful, such accounts have drawn attention to the everyday work and shared understandings that drive the techno-sciences. Subsequent scholarship has revealed that the practices of knowledge and technical workers are both a condition and consequence of techno-scientific development. Scientists, for example, generate publications; wrangle with bureaucracy; operate instruments and information; cultivate consensus or dissent; engage their subjects and sites; and fraternise and politick (Mody, 2015). Their work, in turn, is defined by wider political, ideological, and epistemological formations, as well as their personal, professional, and communal commitments (Felt, Fouché, Miller, and Smith-Doerr, 2017). Science and technology, then, emerge from these processes, while reshaping them – a reality increasingly obscured by technological hype.

What would these arrangements look like in the expanding complex of artificial intelligence (AI)?
Dominant narratives and structures have reified AI as a disembodied, inescapable, coherent force. Yet, critical literature has increasingly tracked the various stages through which the technology has been manufactured, deployed, sustained, and experienced (Suchman, 2023; Pasquinelli, 2023). Within these assemblages, attention has generally and rightly focused on scientists and engineers, academics and executives, and policymakers and product developers (Forsythe, 2001; Butcher, 2018; Seaver, 2022). A fuller account, however, must reckon with the underclass or hidden groups that AI depends on and reproduces, and the actors who contest or appropriate the technology (Crawford, 2021; Gray and Suri, 2019). Each point within this web presents its distinct but entangled work practices, labour regimes, organizational cultures, infrastructures, geographies, histories, and politics.

This symposium therefore explores the practices, understandings, and relations of the vast
workforce that makes AI and related digital technologies possible. For instance, what does
everyday work look like across the production networks of AI? What forms of labour, expertise,
and decision-making do they involve? What lines of communication, status, and organization do
they draw? What kinds of imaginaries, politics, and socialities do they carry? And how is such work geographically distributed and spatially experienced? Through these questions, this symposium joins the growing scholarly effort to emphasise the forces behind and around AI, while unsettling the discourses that render it freestanding, natural, inevitable, and impartial.

Full programme