Singularity – Social Robot Futures

The Tyranny of Life Under Algorithms: A Short Meditation

Nov 24, 2019Jan 31, 2023

By Teresa Heffernan

Alan Turing–the force behind theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and the Universal Turing Machine–was instrumental in cracking intercepted coded messages, which enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis. He was charged with “gross indecency” in 1952 and punished for homosexuality. He submitted to chemical castration in lieu of prison.

Talks/Presentations

On Ethics, AI, and the Humanities

Oct 5, 2019Sep 16, 2021

— Video

In a presentation on the ethical challenges emerging with the rapid expansion of AI and robotics, in which the humanities too have become a target of automation, Teresa Heffernan argues that it is only by maintaining the tensions between these domains that we can hope to have an informed debate about the limits and possibilities of the emergent technology.

Discussion

Why Technoscience Needs Fiction

Apr 27, 2018Jan 31, 2023

By Teresa Heffernan

As science was emerging as a discrete and soon to be dominant way of knowing and as the industrial revolution was transforming the English country-side, Thomas Love Peacock in his “Four Ages of Poetry” (1820) argued that poetry was increasingly useless and retrograde in the age of scientific invention: “A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.”

Discussion

Janelle Monáe’s Spiritual Android

May 12, 2015Jan 31, 2023

By Cate May Burton

Janelle Monáe is an American singer and songwriter whose concept album series, The Metropolis Suite, portrays androids as sentient beings enslaved by industrial masters. Monáe’s android avatar, Cindi Mayweather, is the mediator between hands and mind, between human and robot. This time-traveling android holds out a spiritual promise of love and triumph. In this mix, we can ask what motifs or myths adhere in the idea of artificial intelligence (AI)? And is religious thinking antithetical to political resistance?