AI x Feminism

Following a series of recent researches about the future of AI and its specific ecology of affects, I would like to create and share a new thought experiment, to highlight critical issues, address ambiguities and play with paradoxes at the cross-road of AI and Feminism. The discursive perambulation will set and navigate a broad almost vertiginous, cognitive panorama, mirroring the one of AI.

RBW

Video on Youtube /  Conference program available here.

Challenging beliefs and re-examining assumptions about Artificial Intelligence

The main game changer for the coming years, AI and its (potential) uses have implications and consequences not only in economic terms, but also on culture, ethics and believe systems. Pessimists and those who fear, see rising (human) unemployment and civil unrest coming along, while optimists and those who embrace, are painting a bright future of leisure and creativity.

Either way, other than previous industrial revolutions that saw machinery and tools filling in for mechanical human skills, this time our mental functions are about to be replaced – by machines who are supposed to making predictions and decisions faster and with more accuracy than the human brain can comprehend.

The scale of this challenge has not fully arrived with government agencies, business leaders and scientists, and it seems essential to think about frameworks and regulations that would accompany this change before it settles without other leading forces than the profit-making of the tech industries. Algorithmic deficiencies based on the biases of the programmers need to be identified and a code of conduct as well as greater diversity among the engineers and computer scientists developing AI could go a long way toward minimizing these biases.

To quote Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future: “We need technologists who understand history, who understand economics, who are in conversations with philosophers, we need to have this conversation because our technologists are no longer just developing apps, they’re developing political and economic systems.” These are very present issues that need to be urgently addressed, since the technologies become more prevalent.

Thus, we want to bring diverse speakers from science, art, academia, tech and economy together to analyse the factual status of AI, its impact and its possible futures, and to discuss agencies broaching the mysticism of both technological and artificial power structures, the changing narratives in the human machine discourse and the transfer of gender imbalances from the physical to digital worlds:

Can empathy be programmed and what is it to be human? Does it matter that AI is 95% coded by men? Do we replace the Deus ex Machina with machines with godlike attributes? What holds believes?

By taking facts to arguments and charging them with tension we will intensify the energy thinking holds and playfully expand realities.

Conference page on Muzeum Susch website.