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Join us for a talk with Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of the Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University in the UK. Hosted by Royal Roads University President and Vice-Chancellor Philip Steenkamp.
How to attend
Join us on Facebook Live. Get notified the event is beginning by clicking "going" to the event post or following our page.
You can also just join us on our Royal Roads University Facebook or YouTube page Feb. 3 at 7 p.m.
About the event
References to artificial intelligence (AI) have become a commonplace in tech-related media, where we hear about the ‘rise’ of AI, its purported ubiquity in our lives, and the inevitability of its continued expansion.
Whether celebrated as a transformative innovation or decried as a growing threat, the nature of AI as a technological project goes largely unquestioned.
In this conversation Lucy Suchman offers a different story, focused on the vested interests that sustain the myth of AI, and the enormous gap between AI rhetoric and limits of associated technologies.
Her specific focus is on projects in the automation of targeting, both in its more literal operations in the context of armed conflict and the broader sense of multiple practices of discriminatory profiling.
Central to the analysis is close attention to the elision of images, categories, and things-in-the-world. Fixed and labelled within datasets, images of things and traces of lives stand as proxies suitable for computational analysis.
Closer investigations reveal the complex relations that escape these operations, opening spaces in which to resist the political economy of data-driven technologies and uplift other ways of knowing.
Speaker bio
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of the Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University in the UK. Before taking up that post she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she spent twenty years as a researcher.
The author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007), her current research extends a longstanding critical engagement with the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary militarism. She is concerned with the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world.
In 2010 she received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award and in 2014 the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Bernal Prize for Contributions to the Field. She was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science from 2015-2017.
Learn more about the Changemakers Speakers Series
Visit rruchangemakers.ca for more info on the series and to see future speakers.