Co-hosted by the UCI School of Humanities, the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), and UCI’s Digital Humanities Exchange (DHX)
In the commercial sector, artificial intelligence has acquired significant traction as a marketing device, an investment strategy, and a suite of tools for business process outsourcing. For scholars in the humanities and social sciences, artificial intelligence is, as Kate Crawford (2020) observes, “a two-word phrase onto which is mapped a complex set of expectations, ideologies, desires, and fears.” This symposium invites explorations of AI as a cultural, discursive, and epistemic “paradigm” that collects a loosely knit network of concepts and propositions, images and fantasies, methods and arguments, artifacts and techniques. Through ongoing advances in computational power and troublesome techniques of data harvesting and exploitation, the AI paradigm marks historically and culturally specific transformations in personhood, social relations, labor processes, environmental sensibilities, and resource extraction. In this crucial moment, when various industries are hyping the disruptive implications of AI, we must understand it as a social technology disseminating both new and old forms of power and domination.
Thursday, May 23, 2024
Humanities Gateway 1030
4:00 - 6:00 pm | Conference Kick-Off
6:00 - 7:30 pm | Reception
Friday, May 24, 2024
Humanities Gateway 1030
9:30 am | Coffee
9:45 am | Roundtable conversations begin
4:00 pm | End of conference
For a full schedule of events, please visit: AI Paradigm.
Organizers
Tyrus Miller, Dean, School of Humanities; Julia Lupton, Interim Director, UC Humanities Research Institute; Braxton Soderman and Ricky Crano, the Critical Data Studies Initiative of the Digital Humanities Exchange. Please contact jrlupton@uci.edu for information.
Additional funding provided by the UCI Humanities Center, the UCI EVOKE Lab, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Image: Andrew Benson, video still, 2010
