We are delighted to welcome Professor Jennifer Keating of the University of Pittsburgh join us for a discussion on
What is the Humanist’s Mandate in the Age of AI?
Details Trinity Long Room Hub Wednesday 5th March 2-3.30pm
REGISTER HERE
Abstract: System capability, governance, regulation and human replacement concerns buzz around our cultural space in the context of rapidly developing AI systems. The EU offers leading language on prospective regulation and governance of rapidly developing relationships to data, privacy, personhood and AI, as regions like Asia and North America explore other avenues that prioritize private and public investment in innovation as a value that trumps real and common sense approaches to governance. Meanwhile, our individual and collective relationships to these embodied and disembodied systems often center around the system, its real and imagined affordances, rather than an emphasis on human-centered relationships to these machines and digital tools all the while general public play catch-up on digital fluency.
What is the humanist’s responsibility to draw on our systems of knowledge and refined capacity to open lines of inquiry in this flex point in human history, as voices of reason and guidance in policy development? What can we learn from features of the machine age to draw on concerns pertaining to concepts of personhood, citizenship, ethics of well-being and prioritization of human-to-human and human-to-machine relationships in the age of AI? What ethical concerns are we particularly equipped to guide and steward as we consider private and public relationships to data, memory and evolving descriptions and definitions of personhood and citizenship? And how do we attend to uneven access and development of digital fluency in various publics, in a rapidly shifting historical moment in the global north and the global south, respectively?
