Please join us for a talk by Lauren Klein called After AI. Dr. Klein is a professor at Emory University, where she teaches in the departments of Data & Decision Sciences and English. Refreshments will be served. 

Abstract for After AI: 

What happens after the AI bubble bursts? What happens after all of our organizing and action against the current configuration of power, at long last, succeeds? This talk will begin from the premise that a world after "AI" (scare quotes intended) will not be a world without it, nor will it mean that the biases and other harms associated with our current AI systems will simply go away. The question then, I propose, becomes how we remain attuned to power asymmetries and extractive logics, and account for them in each specific instance of use.

Through examples ranging from an 1580 map made by a Ñudzahui (Mixtec) painter at the request of the Spanish king, which used the state-of-the-art technology of his day to attest to his peoples’ sovereignty over their land, to a present-day community-based AI-enabled text transcription project, to my own applied machine learning research which often rejects the use of AI to protect the people in the data, I will surface a set of strategies for how we can continue to contribute to our collective knowledge, strategies that invite us to both resist “AI” and reimagine its future.