Ecologies of Knowing: AI Ethics and the Critical Posthumanities
Over the last decade, AI ethics has emerged as a critical topic of discussion and debate within the field of artificial intelligence. As the use of AI systems has become more widespread, concerns about fairness, accountability and transparency in their design and regulation have ushered in a new era of digital humanism. Whereas most AI ethics guidelines elevate human-centric design principles as the cutting-edge of tech policy, recent developments in the environmental arts and humanities demonstrate an interest in the limits thereof: the emergence of critical posthumanist thought posits active materiality as the ground for eco-centric approaches to technology that renegotiate the complicated relationship between humans and non-human ‘others.’ In this talk, Andre Uhl will employ the posthumanist predicament to trace the epistemic ecologies that make and unmake the paradigms for critical AI studies. The talk will speculate on discourse interventions that model opportunities for co-creation with and as participants in generative learning and governance practices.
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Andre Uhl is a scholar of new and emerging media whose primary research explores the aesthetics and governance of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data through the lens of critical ecological thought. By bringing his background in media arts and sciences in dialogue with the growing discourse on tech policy, Dr. Uhl's scholarship draws on posthumanist anthropologies and theories of culture to investigate the epistemic infrastructures that constitute, legitimize, and sustain digital environments. His manuscript in progress, Extended Intelligence: Aesthetics and Governance of AI, examines the role of tacit knowledge in collaborative governance practices to speculate on the aesthetic configurations of new discursive spaces that rethink and redraw the relationship between affect, ethics, and justice in the post-anthropocentric age.
Before joining the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge in 2022, Dr. Uhl received his PhD from Harvard University’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (recently renamed to Art, Film and Visual Studies) with a Secondary Field in Science, Technology and Society. He also holds an MFA in New Media from Tokyo University of the Arts, and a BA in Visual Studies and East Asia Studies from Free University Berlin. Dr. Uhl’s work has been recognized with research affiliations at the MIT Media Lab and the East West Center, and fellowships at the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, the Planetary Health Alliance, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, amongst others.