Tag: Artificial IntelligencePage 1 of 2
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…
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…
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…
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…
Aya is anxiously waiting for a future in which humans coexist with robots. She didn’t think this was possible in her lifetime, but when she learned about LOVOT,…
“For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to make a film about libraries,” explains Ben Lewis, the director of Google and the World Brain (2013)….
Shortly after giving birth to her son, Jessica[1] began to experience a health problem that she describes simply as “pain everywhere.” About one month after we initially met…
A techno-optimistic attitude tells us we’re living at an inflexion point where care practices are being transformed by technology. Monitoring and attending to health and well-being are no…
“I don’t have to drink alone,” she paused for comedic effect, “now that I have Alexa.” Thus was the punchline of a story told by a widowed octogenarian…
I’d like to start this post by juxtaposing two scenes. The first one is set about two years ago, and occurred on the third floor of the Provo,…
Reflections on a career tackling some of the critical workplace challenges of our time. I could not have imagined when I entered the PhD program in anthropology at…
Ethnographic explorations with sex dolls, robots, and their makers “I hate it when her eyes flick open. This one, her eyeballs sometimes go in different directions and it…
Two robots traverse the desert floor. Explosions from a decades-old conflict have left a pockmarked and unstable territory, though many more improvised bombs lie concealed in its vast…
A good number of us shout at our laptops when they misbehave, often to no avail. Perhaps soon they will listen. Could we one day teach them—much like…