Human Entities Podcast

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 17 May 2023

Authorship, Agency, and Moral Obligation
Joanna Bryson
Professor of Ethics and Technology in the Centre for Digital Governance at Hertie School in Berlin

How much of our individual human experience can we absorb into machine models when we use machine learning and a huge amount of data? Will AI become sentient? Sovereign? Ambitious? How will living with AI change our daily experience? This talk reflects natural, social, and computing sciences, describing both human and artificial intelligence, then governance, justice, and creativity. What we do matters, and we are obliged to ourselves and our planet to create and maintain good governance of all artefacts of our species.

Joanna Bryson
Joanna J Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, is an academic recognised for broad expertise on intelligence, its nature, and its consequences. She advises governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs globally, particularly in AI policy. She holds two degrees each in psychology and AI (BA Chicago, MSc & MPhil Edinburgh, PhD MIT). Her work has appeared in venues ranging from reddit to the journal Science. She continues to research both the systems engineering of AI and the cognitive science of intelligence, with present focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and new models of governance for AI and ICT.

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 3 May 2023

Smart Power
Orit Halpern
Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden

Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and ‘crisis’. From large scale computer simulations of the weather, to smart cities and infrastructures, to geo-engineering projects, to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, we have arguably transformed the planet into a test-bed and experiment for computational technologies. The penetration of almost every part of life by digital technologies has transformed how we understand nature, culture, and time. But what futures are we imagining, or foreclosing through these planetary ‘experiments’? How have we come to see human survival as fundamentally dependent on computational networks? This talk maps the rise of this ‘smartness mandate’. Tracing genealogies from artificial intelligence, finance, architecture, and art I will develop an account of how ubiquitous computing has become one of the dominant governing logics of our present (and possibly our future) and to what effects.

Orit Halpern
Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of intelligence and evolution; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her latest book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press January 2023) The Smartness Mandate, is a theory and history of the concept of ‘smartness’, that interrogates the relationship between computation, population, economy, and governmentality.

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 26 April 2023

Rebooting democracy
Manuel Arriaga + Pedro Magalhães
Manuel Arriaga is a university professor and one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos; Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon

Democracy is a technology of collective decision-making that aggregates intentions and defines a course of action. However, according to the diagnosis of many, it’s a technology ‘in crisis’. An important part of the contemporary experience of ‘democratic frustration’ seems to result from the contrast between the stagnation of ways of doing politics and the rapid evolution of digital technology. As consumers, we have long learned to expect – and demand – innovation. Yet, as citizens, we regularly confront ourselves with the immutability of mechanisms of governance.

In representative democracy, who is effectively represented? How, and to what extent, are the interests and preferences of people – and different people – converted into policies? With regard to the issue of the environment and climate change, in every election cycle there seems to be a kind of myopia, or short-sightedness, which exclusively focuses on the articulation and resolution of (some) short-term problems.

To what extent can forms of ‘democratic innovation’, especially those that serve to create greater opportunities for political participation, serve to address long-term problems, in particular the climate crisis? What is the potential of other forms of political organisation as a complement, or even alternative, to representative democracy?

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 19 April 2023

Artist talk
Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey is one of the most influential artists working today. Since the late 1990s, his work has looked at the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. He works with sculpture, film, sound and performance⁠ – and sometimes all four at once. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the Turner Prize.

His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, in 2019, Serpentine Gallery, in 2011, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have been presented in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, in 2008. His works are held in the collections of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou.

Artist Talk
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Artist

Somewhat similar to what it is commonly said about migrants, autonomous machines are taken to be a potential threat to some human labour. In military environments, these systems and their efficiency can, in fact, be more lethal than those controlled by people. This idea allows us to roll back to the core definition of intelligence which, since the Industrial Revolution has been deeply linked with efficiency-as-productivity, and subsequent avoidance of errors. This definition which is the heir of a type of rationality, with origins in the Enlightenment, is placed at the top of a hierarchy above all other human thought systems. Problems linked to managing the natural environment, where other later ‘non-rational’ human cultures are encountered, have been solved through domination and even annihilation. We can now see that some AI systems continue this legacy.

In this context, AIELSON [a machine learning model Torres trained to generate spoken-word poetry] reflects upon the zeitgeist, incorporating a complex critique where the system is seen to be connected to humanity (as a reflection) since imperfections are not discarded but embraced. Consequently this contradicts the notion of intelligence as the epitome of flawless efficiency and perfection. Hence, Torres proposes that we should now discuss machine creativity, and how creativity informs human imagination. Her work asks the question: Can we envision another future of possible cooperation between humans and machines, where the natural world is no longer seen as a territory to conquer?

Bio
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado departs from the exploration of the limits of the senses to examine the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, reflecting on the mediated sensorial experiences that (re)construct our perceived reality and that in turn serve to establish a cultural hegemony within the history of technology and the arts. Recently, she received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica for AIELSON, a system developed during her residence on Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program 2019-20.

Her performances and her artworks, which are also part of the collections of Malmo Art Museum and the Public Art Agency of Sweden, have been presented in several countries of the Americas, Central Europe, and Scandinavia, where she is currently based.

#NatureTruthPower: Política ambiental na era da pós-verdade e das plataformas digitais
Bram Büscher
Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University

How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous? 

In this presentation, Bram Büscher traces how environmental action is transformed through the political economy of digital platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Building on a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, he shows how environmental actors mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingency of environmental issues in particular places. Key in understanding this mediation is a reconfiguration of the relations between nature, truth and power in the 21st century. Its upshot is the need for an environmental politics that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power. 

Bio
Bram Büscher is Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University and is a visiting professor at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies at the University of Johannesburg. His research and writing revolve around the political economy of environment and development with specific interests in biodiversity, conservation, new media, digitalization and violence. He developed the concept of Nature 2.0, which focuses on the political economy of new media and its implications for participation in nature conservation. He is the author of Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (2013), co-author, with Robert Fletcher, of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (2020) and author of The Truth About Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism (2021). This talk was followed by a Q&A session. 

Sensing Smart Forests
Jennifer Gabrys
Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge

Forests are increasingly sensorized environments. Whether in the form of camera traps to monitor organisms or the Internet of Things to detect wildfires, there are an array of sensor technologies that observe and constitute forests in relation to scientific inquiry, Indigenous land claims, environmental governance, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

This presentation will investigate the sensory arrangements that Smart Forests generate. It will ask how sensory infrastructures materialize as distributions of power and governance, while considering the sensory practices that transform and potentially re-constitute dominant regimes of perception toward other inhabitations and milieus.

Bio
Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. She also leads the Citizen Sense and AirKit projects, which have both received funding from the ERC (European Research Council).

She writes on digital technologies, environments and social life, with recent publications including How to Do Things with Sensors (2019) and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016).

The European Union’s regulatory framework for Artificial Intelligence
Inês Cisneiros
Lawyer

On her appointment as President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen made regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) a top priority. In her view legislation is fundamental to safeguard the European Union’s citizens’ fundamental rights and encourage investment in safe innovation and technological development. As a result, in April 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal which when approved would prohibit harmful AI practices and impose restrictions on high-risk AI systems.

This ethical stance will position the EU against the lack of regulation in the US and state control in China. From Cambridge Analytica to the recent Project Pegasus, from facial recognition to social credit system, it is increasingly apparent that the abusive use of digital computation compromises human rights.

So, how would this regulation protect citizens in the context of a globalized society? Could the European strategy influence worldwide adoption of good AI practices? How does this proposal relate to the General Data Protection Regulation?

Alice Benessia
Do we really want and need to be smart? Can we?
The imaginaries of the Internet of Things and their inherent contradictions

Emergent information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), constantly redefine the texture of our culture, society and lifestyle, raising a number of fundamental epistemic, normative and ethical issues, in a constant co-evolution. These technologies are constructed, named, offered, and ultimately regulated, according to and through specific techno-scientific imaginaries, here defined as collections of visual and verbal metaphors that are created and communicated both in the specialized literature and in the mass media for the public at large.

Wonder, power, control and urgency can be defined as standard imaginaries of techno-scientific innovation: the fundamental axes defining an ideal space in which the multifaceted vision of the IoT can be projected and analyzed, in terms of what we want (wonder), we can (power and control) and we need (urgency) to be smart. Within this ideal space, we will examine together a variety media available on the web and produced by some of the key actors of the IoT revolution.

This exploration leads to an open-ended reflection on the underlying aims and contradictions of the ICT enhancement, in relation to the possible decline of some of the fundamental attributes of our integrity and agency.

Bio
Alice Benessia holds a PhD in Science Technology and Law, an M.A. in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics and an M.F.A in Photography and Related Media. She is a research fellow on Epistemology of Sustainability at the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Sustainability (IRIS) based at the University of Torino. She has been appointed expert at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. She is a founding member of the Italian Association for Sustainability Science. She also works as a visual artist and has lectured on photography and visual arts in numerous national and international participatory workshops. Her interdisciplinary research deals with epistemological issues arising in the framework of art, science and sustainability with special interest in visual language.

Artists’ group !Mediengruppe Bitnik will present recent works exploring internet subculture, surveillance and bots. They will talk about their recently completed work Random Darknet Shopper which directly connected art spaces with the darknet via an automated online shopping bot. With a weekly budget of $100 in Bitcoins, the bot went shopping on the deep web where it randomly chose and purchased one item and had it mailed directly to the exhibition space, creating a landscape of traded goods from the darknet. Bitnik will also present Same Same – Watching Algorithms, a software bot which replaces all imagery on the website of the art space Cabaret Voltaire with algorithmically similar images.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read: not mediengruppe bitnik) live and work in Zurich/London. They are contemporary artists working on and with the internet. Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally introducing a loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works formulate fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues. In early 2013 !Mediengruppe Bitnik sent a parcel to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The parcel contained a camera which broadcast live on the internet its journey through the postal system. They describe Delivery for Mr. Assange as a SYSTEM_TEST and a Live Mail Art Piece. The art group are also known for sending a bot called Random Darknet Shopper on a shopping spree on the darknets where it randomly bought objects like ecstasy and had them sent directly to the gallery space. !Mediengruppe Bitnik are the artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo. Their accomplices are the London filmmaker and researcher Adnan Hadzi and the reporter Daniel Ryser.

Their works have been shown internationally including: Shanghai Minsheng 21st Century Museum, City Art Gallery Ljubljana, Kunsthaus Zürich, NiMk Amsterdam, Space Gallery London, Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, Beton7 Athens, Museum Folkwang Essen, Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Beijing Get It Louder Contemporary Art Biennial, La Gaîté Lyrique Paris, Gallery EDEN 343 São Paulo and the Roaming Biennale Tehran.

They have received awards including: Swiss Art Award, Migros New Media Jubilee Award, Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica.