Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power

Wendy gives a keynote at Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power (A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar) at Cambridge, part of the Summer School on the same topic.

The University of Cambridge is hosting a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power from May 2020–April 2021. The Seminar is co-hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the Faculty of English. Sawyer Seminars support comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. This Seminar aims to develop an international interpretive community capable of offering a structural, historical perspective on the promises and problematics of AI and machine learning.

This new community will include participants from a variety of fields and backgrounds including activists, AI practitioners, artists, citizens, critical theorists, decolonial scholars, historians of science and technology, and scholars of race, gender, and disability studies. We will engage in critical and comparative research, from antiquity to the present, on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments in AI technologies to investigate their entanglement in systems of politics, power and control. Four themes will guide our considerations: hidden labour, encoded behaviour, cognitive injustice and disingenuous rhetoric. These themes direct our inquiry without narrowing the contributions we plan to support.

The Seminar’s activities include a week long Summer School at Homerton College, Cambridge, with arrival and a welcome dinner on Sunday 12 and meeting from Monday 13 to Saturday 18 July 2020.