Friday 29th of November 10:15-12:00 At BET.F.108
On the 29th of November, DIGSUM and the Department of Sociology at Umeå University are hosting a seminar where Amanda Lagerkvist, Uppsala University, will talk about “Parsing the AI Apocalypse”.
More information [here].
Abstract
Scholars in critical AI studies have labeled AI a floating signifier; a fixed uncontroversial and inevitable thing that at the same time escapes definition, suggesting that this vagueness accounts for its hegemonic power (Lindgren 2023, ed. 2023, Kave and Dihal 2023, Suchman 2023). Taking this torch, this presentation adds a new dimension to the critique: it proposes that the AI industry and pundits are exploiting the affective registers of apocalypticism, and by appearing on the global stage as AI prophets – offering both techno-messianic predictions and techno-catastrophic warnings about existential risk – they are performing a cultural memory of prophecy, with roots in the Hebrew Bible. Based on work in progress within two research projects on AI, the future and the end of the world (Lagerkvist, Scheuer and Coeckelbergh forthcoming) I will in this presentation suggest that while apocalypticism has operated mainly by invocation across media and popular cultural forms in late modernity (Collins 2006, Walliss and Aston 2011), the AI industry are today (despite their explicit secular world view) producing a reseacralized apocalyptic AI imaginary, replete with explicit religious language (Singler 2017, Scheuer 2021, Lagerkvist 2020, 2024). To destabilize AI as a fixture on the human horizon, I argue that we will be further served by bothering the politico-religious dimensions of the ambivalent AI imaginary.
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is the PI of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018), she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has explored digital memories, death online, and lived experiences of automation. She heads the WASP-HS project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds” (2020-2024) in which her own study focuses on disability, norms of being human and eugenic world building in the age of automation. She was awarded new grants in 2022 from the Bank of Sweden (RJ), the Swedish Research Council (VR), and the Wallenberg Foundations for research projects on the intersections of datafication, disability, and selfhood; and on the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. She is the architect behind The Human Observatory for Digital Existence: a collaborative platform for monitoring what it means to be human in the face of rapid technological transformations and for promoting new academic values based on existential ways of knowing, in collaboration with different stakeholders, institutions, individuals, authorities and NGOS.