Lecture by Orit Halpern at Weizenbaum Institute Berlin on July.13. 2023

Event venue: Weizenbaum Institute, Hardenbergstraße 32, 10623 Berlin

Event Time: Thursday, July 13th 2023; 18:30 - 22:00 

Lecture by Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern: Automating Freedom: Neo-liberalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics

In the 100th anniversary year of Josef Weizenbaum, we would like to invite you to a lecture by Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern (TU Dresden), organized together with our Fellow Dr. Hannah Fitsch.

In her keynote “Automating Freedom: Neo-liberalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics”, Orit Halpern interrogates the history of models of decision-making and agency in machine learning, neo-liberal economic thought, and finance in order to understand how reactionary politics, civil rights, and technology are being reformulated in our present. While the relationship between the Right, post-truth, suggestion algorithms, and social media has long been documented, rarely has there been extensive investigation of how ideas of choice and freedom become recast in a manner amenable to machine automation, financialization, and to particular brands of post-1970s alt-Right discourses. An analysis of this history demonstrates a new logic within algorithmic and artificial intelligent rationalities that intersects with, but is also not merely a repetition of, earlier histories of reason, eugenics, sexism, and racism. This situation provokes serious challenges to political action, but also to our theorization of democracy, collectivity, and diversity. 

Please register for the event via https://survey.lamapoll.de/Registration_OritHalpern/