Cards and Codes: Spirituality and Magic in the (Bio)technological Era
This is not a scientific or technological project, but perhaps it is a project about science and technology. My proposal is to create a magical tool, a tarot…
This is not a scientific or technological project, but perhaps it is a project about science and technology. My proposal is to create a magical tool, a tarot…
I’m very excited to announce the launch of the Calm Tech Institute, a new design organization creating standards for technology which respect our time, attention, and humanity. Our…
On a hot August afternoon in 2018, I attended a public lecture on AI and the future of work, broadly defined. Back then, I was a student in…
NASA’s homepage is as glitzy as you would expect of the U.S. Government’s sexiest administration. Glossy pictures of nebulas, astronauts, and asteroids float across the top of the…
When I first heard about chatGPT, the main thing I was concerned about, like many others, was that students would use it instead of writing their own work.…
Scientist operating an algorithmic divination machine as imagined by Midjourney’s AI (image by Author & Midjourney). Algorithms are tools of divination.[1] Like cowry shells, scapular bones,…
By choosing to look at the funding from the American Government on this field, I aim to tell a different story about AI. A quick search for the…
Download the transcript of this interview. For this episode of Platypod, I talked to Dr. Tanja Ahlin about her research, work, and academic trajectory. She’s currently a postdoctoral…
[Featured image courtesy of Mike MacKenzie, https://www.vpnsrus.com/, and Wikimedia Commons] Various SAR members have suggested that SAR bring to Santa Fe an expert to talk about the possibilities…
After writing my last post about chatGPT, I got in touch with Nick Seaver to see what he had to say about some of these issues. Here’s our conversation:…
So curiosity finally got the best of me and I started looking into this whole chatGPT thing that is poised to bring about the ruin of society. I…
In the film Doctor Dolittle (1967), the title character yearns to “Talk to the Animals,” as the song goes, to understand their mysterious and often vexing ways. It…
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to an audio recording of this post as read by Ritwik Banerji Sensory ethnography continually emphasizes …
Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast, 1926. Detail. Image in public domain Introduction: surveil, classify and predict by Alexa Hagerty and Livia Garofalo The works distilled by the…
Illustration of algorithmically simulated flocking behavior (2021, created by Anna Lukina) With the growing size of historical data available to researchers and industrial practitioners, developing al…
In December 2020, a group of social scientists gathered virtually at the LSE Department of Anthropology to discuss the relationship between data science and the social sciences. We…
Vor hundert Jahren erfand Karel Čapek für sein Theaterstück „R.U.R.“ das Wort „Roboter“. Ist die damalige Reflexion zum Verhältnis zwischen Mensch, Umwelt und künstlicher Intelligenz noch aktuell?
How do mental illnesses sound? What are the stakes of using machines to render the signs of psychiatric suffering audible? These questions drive the teams of psychiatric and…
Photo by @charlesdeluvio A genderless gendered listening device in a ‘modern’ Norwegian home Introduction In this essay I will explore a conversation that I had with Google Home…
In the zeitgeist of academia, surveillance has clearly an ominous connotation. However, is surveillance not fundamentally a way of looking? More formally, a way of looking at totalities.…
On January 21, 1967, a mild winter Saturday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of computer researchers from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…
Artificial intelligence can perform feats that seem like sorcery. AI can drive cars and fly drones. It can compose original music, write poetry that isn’t too awful, and…
The Ocolus in New York City — Photo by @patresinger Everyday Mediations with Artificial Intelligence You may not be familiar with the field of Anthropology. It is a field of…
Photo by @bechir Small Data Versus Big Data — Ethnographic Tactics and Algorithms as Culture Why does data have to be so big and what would small data look like in relation…