Questioning History in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Sponsor(s): Department of Rhetoric, Department of Film & Media, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Berkeley Center for New Media, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society, Stiftelsen Gustaf Sterns Fond, Stiftelsen Karl Staaffs fond
Questioning History in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Thursday, April 11 – Friday, April 12 at UC Berkeley
Keynote: Shane Denson, Stanford University
5-7pm on Thursday, April 11
in Dwinelle 142
Seminars Thursday, 4/11
in the Social Sciences Matrix
10am – 12pm
Aaron Mendon-Plasek, Yale University
“‘AI Winters’ as Moral Prejudice: How Machine Learning Origin Stories Constrained Political Policy, Scientific Imaging, & Legal Reason-Giving”
—and—
Ekaterina Babintseva, Purdue University
“The Mind and the Algorithm: Bringing the Unconscious to Soviet Artificial Intelligence”
2 – 4pm
Johan Fredrikzon, UC Berkeley
“The Past as Error: Archival Regimes in Cybernetics & AI”
—and—
David Bates, UC Berkeley
“Prediction is not Anticipation: Machine Learning & the Historicity of the Human”
Seminars Friday, 4/12
in the Social Sciences Matrix
10am - 12pm
Julia Irwin, UC Berkeley
“William James’s Neural Network, Fringe Consciousness, & Historical Time”
—and—
Christina Vagt, UC Santa Barbara
“Recursive History: The Economic Reason of AI”
1 – 2:30pm
Jacob Gaboury, UC Berkeley & Xiaochang Li, Stanford University Roundtable: “AI History as Media History”
3 – 5pm
Robin Manley Mihran, UC Berkeley “Genealogy & Form: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Theses on History”
—and—
Jessica Riskin, Stanford University
“Turing Among the Machines”
Speaker: Shane Denson, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Stanford University
Speaker: Ekaterina Babintseva, Assistant Professor, History, Purdue University
Facilitator: David Bates, Professor, UC Berkeley
Facilitator: Johan Fredrikzon, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Jacob Gaboury, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Facilitator: Julia Irwin, PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Xiaochang Li, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
Speaker: Robin Manley Mihran, Graduate Student, Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Aaron Mendon-Plasek, Resident Fellow, Yale University
Speaker: Jessica Riskin, Professor, Stanford University
Admission Information:
Free and open to the public. No RSVP required. For access to the pre-circulated seminar papers, sign up here.
The Social Sciences Building is wheelchair accessible.
If you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features to fully participate in this event, please contact Eve Letendre at rfa [at] berkeley.edu.