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Amanda Lagerkvist, Uppsala universitet

Seminarium: Amanda Lagerkvist

fre
29
nov
Tid Fredag 29 november, 2024 kl. 10:15 - 12:00
Plats BET.F.108, Beteendevetarhuset

Välkomna till ett seminarium med Amanda Lagerkvist, Uppsala universitet. Seminariet ges på engelska och har titeln:

Parsing the AI Apocalypse

 

Abstract
Scholars in critical AI studies have labeled AI a floating signifier; a fixed uncontroversial and inevitable thing that at the same time escapes definition, suggesting that this vagueness accounts for its hegemonic power (Lindgren 2023, ed. 2023, Kave and Dihal 2023, Suchman 2023). Taking this torch, this presentation adds a new dimension to the critique: it proposes that the AI industry and pundits are exploiting the affective registers of apocalypticism, and by appearing on the global stage as AI prophets – offering both techno-messianic predictions and techno-catastrophic warnings about existential risk – they are performing a cultural memory of prophecy, with roots in the Hebrew Bible. Based on work in progress within two research projects on AI, the future and the end of the world (Lagerkvist, Scheuer and Coeckelbergh forthcoming) I will in this presentation suggest that while apocalypticism has operated mainly by invocation across media and popular cultural forms in late modernity (Collins 2006, Walliss and Aston 2011), the AI industry are today (despite their explicit secular world view) producing a reseacralized apocalyptic AI imaginary, replete with explicit religious language (Singler 2017, Scheuer 2021, Lagerkvist 2020, 2024). To destabilize AI as a fixture on the human horizon, I argue that we will be further served by bothering the politico-religious dimensions of the ambivalent AI imaginary.

 

Bio
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is the PI of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018), she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has explored digital memories, death online, and lived experiences of automation. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP 2022), she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She heads the WASP-HS (https://wasp-hs.org/) project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds” (2020-2024) in which her own study focuses on disability, norms of being human and eugenic world building in the age of automation. She was awarded new grants in 2022 from the Bank of Sweden (RJ), the Swedish Research Council (VR), and the Wallenberg Foundations for research projects on the intersections of datafication, disability, and selfhood; and on the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. She is the editor of Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (Routledge 2019), with a foreword by John Durham Peters of Yale University. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media and Society, Media, Culture & Society, AI & Society, Media Theory, Journal of Digital Social Research, Mediekultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, Feminist Media Studies, The Senses and Society, Journal of Visual Culture, Space and Culture, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Television & New Media, Environmental Science & Policy, The Sociological Review. She is the architect behind The Human Observatory for Digital Existence: a collaborative platform for monitoring what it means to be human in the face of rapid technological transformations and for promoting new academic values based on existential ways of knowing, in collaboration with different stakeholders, institutions, individuals, authorities and NGOS.

Contact
Dept. of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, Box 513, SE-751 20, Uppsala, Sweden. Mobile: +46(0)73-660 0574.  
E-mail: amanda.lagerkvist@im.uu.se
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Evenemangstyp: Seminarium