We're pleased to bring you this series of four talks from “Intelligence” in the Absence of Life, held on April 9, 2024 at the University of Toronto. The workshop was organized and moderated by Teresa Heffernan, JHI’s 2023-24 Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow. View the talks below or on YouTube.
Paris Marx: Don't Buy the AI Fantasy
Elke Schwarz: Ethics in Absentia: The Curious Absence of the Human in Moral Reasoning about AI Weapons
Lucy Suchman: Absent Presences in Military Imaginaries of AI-enabled Warfighting
Ron Deibert: AI and the Absence of Civil Accountability
Workshop abstract: Those who work in the artificial intelligence industry routinely speak of AI as human-like, but what does it mean to speak of creativity or intelligence or ethics in the absence of life? From the restructuring of labour to AI weapons systems to civil accountability, these talks open a conversation about what gets obscured in the AI hype cycle.