AI Origin Myth

April 7 at 5:30pm in Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall, Dartmouth College.

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Talk 1: 

Myths of the artificial: technogenesis and the second Eden by Kanta Dihal

Abstract

From the Enlightenment period onwards, the Christian West increasingly began to consider technology as the means to build a new Eden, an artificial paradise. Technological progress came to be seen not only as a way to improve lives, but as a defining characteristic of humanity, a concept called 'technogenesis'. However, this inspired the notion that a lack of technological progress equates to inferiority, a key justification of colonial exploitation. Today, AI is imagined as the key to the new Eden. This talk asks whether it will replicate an ideology of subjugation.

Talk 2:

Myths of intelligence: hierarchies of humans and machines by Stephen Cave

The AI revolution is predicated on the primacy of intelligence: the idea that it is a singular faculty of critical importance to the trajectory of civilization. But, like the idea of technological progress mentioned above, this idea has its origins in the logic of colonialism, and was instrumental in creating racialised, gendered and class-based hierarchies of the human. This short talk explores how this dark history of intelligence shapes the hopes and fears we have for AI.