In this KTH Humanities Tech event, Nishant Shah will provide a critique of AI as well as discussing what AI (and we/our world) could be. The talk will be followed by an extended conversation. More invited participants may be added to the event.
Nishant Shah is the Dean of the Graduate School at the ArtEZ University of the Arts, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, and the co-founder of the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. Shah’s work is at the intersections of technology, affect, identity, and social and political movements. He currently is preoccupied with questions of digital simulations and our capacity to tell truth in the face of discriminating data.
Abstract:One of the most visible emphasis in the social acceleration of Artificial Intelligence is what I call an “extinction impulse”.
This manifests itself in multiple ways – in how we design-think problems, how we conceptualise our users, how we buy into the promise of A.I. and how we imagine that the answer to our A.I. concerns is going to be more A.I.
Following the logic of digital capital and Silicon Valley fueled visions, current digital development in general, and with A.I. in particular, perpetuate myths which we have taken as natural.
In this talk, I hope to show how a feminist and person-of-colour critique of these myths, and the alternatives they provide might offer us a more hopeful, inclusive and a humane way of building worlds that are made for survival.