Talk at Columbia University Orit Halpern - The Smartness Mandate: Neo-liberalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics

Talk by Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern at Columbia University - The Smartness Mandate: Neo-liberalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics 

Time: April 25th, 2024; 18:15-20:00

This talk 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 there has 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.

Link: https://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/events/orit-halpern-smartness-mandate-neo-liberalism-artificial-intelligence-and-politics