Upcoming events
The Human Measure(d)
We are starting off our seminar series, HumAIn works, with the theme
“The Human Measure(d)”.
Ours is a human made world. Not a spot that humans (predominantly of a specific variety) have not touched so as to reflect their own image back at them. Scholars have been seeking ways out of this peculiar self-absorption; yet, every theory attempting to crack open and break free of the human frame – every ‘post-ism’ – somehow returns us to it.
Critical debates on Artificial Intelligence are no exception. Since its inception, AI has been a field in which the mythical desire of finding oneself in the form of a radically Other has been played out. And while warnings about the fallacies of anthropocentric and anthropomorphic thinking abound, it is in these very warnings that central positions of human-centredness tend to become reproduced.
Meanwhile, the industries driving the paradigm of ever-increasing human-machine immersion have gained substantial experience in measuring, programming and meeting human needs. While these measures might be decoupled from fully-rounded human entities, the idea of the human emerging from their agglomerative procedures nevertheless suggests that humanity once more is – and should be – at the centre of attention.
Against this backdrop, we pose the term “The Human Measure(d)” as a provocation and an object to think and stimulate discussion with. While all measures are principally human, they should never be perceived as being so purely and exclusively. Indeed, the social and the technological need to be seen as co-constitutive of the human. And yet, there seems something unfinished and undigested in that which pertains to the human in our existing theoretical arrangements concerning AI, and it is these unfinished and hard-to-think aspects that our seminar series wants to foreground.
The seminar series
With this seminar series we invite speakers and host events this autumn to discuss what it means for our understanding of AI applications that the humans for which they are designed have bodies that are imperfect and finite, and through which humans are separated from and, at the same time, in touch with each other, all the while devising symbols so as to compensate for and fill the resulting distances.