Social & Cultural Frameworks for ‘Artificial Intelligence’
A closed workshop which aims to identify a line or lines of research that could lead to a longer funded project.
The goal of this workshop is to identify a line or lines of research that could lead to a longer funded project. Social and cultural research on machine learning, large language models, and related technologies has inspired enormous interest and remarkable results. At the same time, it is poorly funded by comparison with AI research itself. At the ISRF, we would like to do our part to develop the social and cultural frameworks that a desirable social incorporation of these technologies requires.
Our initial lens on AI has been attention studies. Will AI enhance society’s powers of attention, thinking, reading, programming, writing and forming advanced states of consciousness, or will it reduce this distributed intelligence?
We are very concerned about the state of social and cultural research in universities and about conditions for learning and thinking in society and culture more generally. For example, we are funding research on alternatives to green finance for just climate transitions. These will never happen without strong public support, and strong support depends on clear public understanding of the details of the issues at stake. How can we insure that AI helps this wider and more profound understanding of urgent public issues?
We’ve grouped participants under four headings, extrapolating from your advance papers. These are Human Interpretation, Socialisations of AI, Human/Machine Cognition, and Public AI Re-education. We aren’t bound by these rubrics: there is abundant overlap among the papers and across these four topics, and a wide range of issues will no doubt emerge from our discussions. We’ve reserved two final sessions for wider discussion and the identification of next steps.
Participants to include:
Elaine Auyoung Associate Professor of English, University of Minnesota
Alan Blackwell Professor of Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Simon Fraser University
Yves Citton Professor of Literature and Media, University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis
Lauren Goodlad Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University
Sean Hanna Professor of Design Computing, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Alex Hartley Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Elizabeth Losh Professor of English & American Studies, College of William and Mary
Carolyn Pedwell Professor of Digital Media, University of Lancaster
Marion Thain Professor of Culture and Technology, University of Edinburgh
Sashank Varma Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech
Chaired by Lars Cornelissen, Baindu Kallon and Chris Newfield.
