[PHILOS-L] Invitation reading group - philosophy and 'AI' - early career researchers

[Marilou Niedda]

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Dear reader,

 

This email is an invitation for a series of three online reading sessions for early career researchers working in philosophy on themes surrounding ‘AI’. These sessions are simultaneously the introduction of a new collective, named Philosophy, Critique, and ‘AI’ (PCAI), initiated by Marilou Niedda (PhD-candidate, Utrecht University) and Judith Campagne (PhD-candidate, Vrije Universiteit Brussel).

 

The PCAI is a collective of early career researchers working on questions regarding ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) from a predominantly philosophical perspective. The group seeks to foster space for politicised philosophical reflection on ‘AI’, while refusing to succumb to overly simplistic characterisations in terms of either ‘salvation’ or ‘demise’. Being a collective, PCAI creates such space through various activities, starting with a reading group, which is for early career scholars at any stage in their PhD/post-doc working on critical philosophical approaches to ‘AI’. The collective understands techno-scientific practices to be situated within social structures that are in turn embedded in logics of domination. As such, we recognise that political reflections on ‘AI’ can only be approached through a plurality of different critical theoretical (e.g., sociopolitical, epistemic, normative) lenses, which pertain to minoritised (e.g., feminist, decolonial, queer) perspectives. Ultimately, the aims of the PCAI are twofold: to reflect on how and why critical theorisations are carried out, but also to question how the term ‘AI’ is (continuously) constructed, used, and enforced.

 

The first round of reading sessions takes place online and is open to all early career researchers. You can sign up by sending an email to the following addresses: m.ni...@uu.nl; judith.van.loo...@vub.be. The themes, readings, and dates for the first sessions are as follows:

 

Session 1: 25.09.2024; 17h-19h CET – Starting point Philosophy, Critique, and ‘AI’(online) ·      Browne, Jude. “AI and Structural Injustice. A Feminist Perspective.” In Feminist AI. Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInery, 328-346. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ·      Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. 2024. “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence”. First Monday 29 (4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636. Session 2: 06.11.2024; 17h-19h CET – Problematizing ‘AI’ through datafication (online) ·      Katz, Yarden. “Artificial Whiteness.” In Artificial Whiteness. Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence, by Yarden Katz, 153-182. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. ·      D’Ignazio, Catherine; Klein, Lauren. F. “Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach.” In Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, 49-73. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023   Session 3: 11.12.2024; 17h-19h CET – Cyberfeminism (online)        ·      Plant, Sadie, From “Scattered brains, neurotics” to “Intuition”, then from “Wetware,      dryware, silicon” to “quanta”. In Zeros + Ones: Digital Culture Women and the New Technoculture. 1998. ·      Adam, Alison, Chapter 9 “The Ethical Dimension of Cyberfeminism.” In Reload/ Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, 158-174. Edited by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, 2002.

 

We hope to meet you at the start of next academic year. In case of any questions, do not hesitate to reach out.

 

With kind wishes,

Marilou Niedda and Judith Campagne

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