Our Romantic Past and Robotic Future

10. Juni 2016, 11.00 Uhr ACHTUNG: RAUMÄNDERUNG: Kollegiumgasse 2, Audimax

Industrial Design scionic®  lädt zum Vortrag von Hamid Ekbia.

The upsurge of computer technologies in our lives has generated two common types of reaction. Some people face this with hope and optimism, dreaming of a future where all our problems —from poverty, famine, and eternal life to climate change, economic depression, and war—will be solved through technological innovations such as robotics. Others, however, face the situation with angst, pessimism, and nostalgia for a romantic past where things were apparently in good shape. Despite their differences, both of these views are based on some shared assumptions and fallacies, which I will discuss in this talk.

Hamid Ekbia
is Professor of Informatics, Cognitive Science, and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he also directs the Center for Research on Mediated Interaction. He is interested in the political economy of computing and in how technologies mediate socio-economic relations in modern societies. His book “Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence” (Cambridge University Press, 2008) was a critical-technical analysis of Artificial Intelligence. His new co-authored book, “Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism”, examines computer-mediated modes of value extraction in capitalist economies (MIT Press, 2016). He is the co-editor of a volume titled “Big Data Is Not a Monolith” (MIT Press, 2016). A forthcoming manuscript studies armed drones as cultural artifacts that signify a historical project of modernist domination. In the summer of 2014, Ekbia co-organized a symposium on “Reconfiguring Global Space: The Geography, Politics, and Ethics of Drone Warfare”.

Professor Ekbia ist Senior Fellow bei am IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften | Kunstuniversität Linz in Wien.