People Are Not Fixed Media
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to an audio recording of this post as read by Ritwik Banerji Sensory ethnography continually emphasizes …
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
Mapping Algorithmic Assumptions: Reflections from a Society for Psychological Anthropology roundtable by Alexa Hagerty
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…
Human as the Ultimate Authority in Control
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…
Dialogues on Artificial Intelligence
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…
Der ‚Roboter‘ wird 100. Über eine (nicht nur) literarische Utopie
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?
The Body Audible: From Vocal Biomarkers to a Phrenology of the Throat by Beth Semel
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…
Me, My Data and OK Google
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…
‘Dynamic Totalities’: Data Surveillance as a Paradigm
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.…
MacHack VI: Computer chess and the roots of AI
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…
Is Artificial Intelligence Magic?
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…
Digital Anthropology and Facebook Governance
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…
Small Data Versus Big Data — Ethnographic Tactics and Algorithms as Culture
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…
The Future of LOVOT: Between Models of Emotion and Experiments in Affect in Japan
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,…
Google’s Empire: The Science Fiction of Power
“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).…
Listening to/with Technology: Meditation Apps as the New Voice of Mental Health
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…
The Dawn of Digital Therapeutics
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…
Dumbwaiters and Smartphones: The Responsibility of Intelligence
“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…
Gods, AIs, and Mormon Transhumanism
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,…
An Anthropologist in Silicon Valley
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…
A Feeling for Robotic Skin
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…
A Report on the 2018 4S Conference in Sydney, Australia by Tessa Leach
What characterises STS in different regions? What kinds of research projects, educational programs, and people are doing STS around the world? What problems exist in different regions? Can…
The Age of Cultured Machines
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…
What If Machines Could Learn the Way Children Do?
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…
The Automation and Privatization of Community Knowledge
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about community, who we are as a community, what keeps us connected and together, and how community knowledge is stored and distributed.…