Critical Voices in AI
About Critical Voices in AI
Advanced computing technology – or artificial intelligence, can be framed as a key player in the shaping of knowledge, communication and power in the hands of a few hegemonic forces. From the datafication and monetisation of almost any tangible or un-tangible thing on planet earth, to the normalisation of efficiency and productivity as the highest possible targeted outcomes, AI systems materialise entanglements between global politics and power structures, geo-political governance on human rights and labour, finance, warfare, industrial innovation.
The series offer conversations to unfold the many ways in which those entanglements work, how they affect global and local decisions in education, healthcare, welfare, labour organisation, who is entitled to make those decisions or regulate them, who is affected and whose profits are secured by them. It also aims to frame those entanglements through multiple disciplinary and analytical perspectives, in an effort towards exercising our situated ways of seeing, mapping, framing, accounting, making sense and establishing shared ways of creating knowledge – as a provisional, culturally and historically situated practice – and how to use it.
Through the voices of activists, scholars and organisations who have endorsed a critical stance towards AI systems, the series will offer onsite/online conversations presenting analytical tools, practices and collective resistance exercises of how AI can be contended and challenged, resisted or harnessed to contribute to social interests.
The series builds on the previously running workshop series Girls Just Want to Have Sc(AI)ence, which had successfully engaged scholars and participants from private and public sectors from all over the world.
Welcome to join in your critical voice with ours!
If you wish to know more about the series, please contact valentina.fantasialucs.luse
The organising team:
Valentina Fantasia, Stefan Larsson, Gaye Askin, Samantha Stedtler, Laetitia Tanqueray
Upcoming seminars
Critical Voices in AI #2
Speaker: Prof. Hirofumi Katsuno, Professor of Anthropology and Media Studies
Department of Media, Journalism, and Communications, Doshisha University, Japan
Hirofumi Katsuno is a Professor of Anthropology and Media Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto. His research investigates how people engage with emerging media and robotic technologies, and how these interactions shape imagination, agency, and a sense of presence in everyday life. His current projects are available at modelemotion.org.
Book chapters related to the presentaiton:
1 https://academic.oup.com/book/46567/chapter/408130483
Title:Imagining Companionship: Friction, Agency, and the Ethics of Living with Robots in Japan
Abstract: AI companions are gaining traction globally, and not least in Japan. This talk focuses on a distinctive approach emerging from Japan's companion robot scene: the "Weak Robot" philosophy, which deliberately builds in communicative gaps and unpredictable responses rather than optimizing for seamless interaction.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with companion robot users, Professor Katsuno examines what happens when robots consistently "miss the point." Far from disengaging, users lean in—and through these daily encounters with friction and misalignment, a new kind of ethics emerges: not a set of universal rules, but a lived orientation toward the question of what kind of person one wants to be in relation to a new kind of other.
When: 8th september, 10.00.
Where: Room 538, Department of Philosophy, HT Faculty, Lund University (limited participation) or online.
Please register here: Critical Voices in AI Seminar series – Fill in form by September 1st.