DDI Fall Speaker Series – Aaron Mendon- Plasek (Yale University)

Aaron is a historian of science and technology. His work examines how schemes of quantification, including their material, cultural, and institutional instantiations, have been used to imagine, enact, and justify social order. His first book project offers a revisionist history of machine learning, from WWII to the present, that demonstrates how and why it became thinkable and subsequently “reasonable” for learning machines and machine learning strategies, rooted in conceptions of creativity and human judgment, to adjudicate social questions in the 21st century. Prior to getting his PhD, he curated art exhibitions and wrote poetry, essays, & criticism. He’s the Knight Digital Public Sphere Fellow at the Information Society Project, and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Prior to this he held competitive fellowships at Columbia as a GSAS Teaching Scholar Fellow (2021-22), a Contemporary Preceptor Fellow in the Columbia Core (2020-21), and a Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (2015-2020). This is a hybrid event.