Agenda

Lucy Suchman - Prof Emerita, Lancaster University UK
Guest hosted by the ERC projetcs AI MODELS (GA n. 101088645) and HealthXCross (GA n. 949742)

Chair: Giorgio Ciani

This lecture is offered as a contribution to the small but expanding movement to resist the proposition that artificial intelligence (AI) is the driving technology of our age, an assertion that
– whether offered as cause for celebration or alarm – serves the interests of those invested in AI (better understood as algorithmic intensification). The aim is to anchor debate about the efficacy of algorithmic technologies in their politics, raising a set of questions otherwise absent from the discussion. I explore those questions in the domain on which my own research is focused, the martial epistemologies of data-driven warfighting, which is where algorithmic intensification has its most immediately lethal effects. The erasure of liveliness is central to the military programme, rendering always potentially unruly persons inside the machine as disciplined operators, while dehumanising those who are its justificatory targets. I report my work in progress on tracking the discursive sleights of hand that sustain AI-enabled militarism’s mythology of its own coherence and rationality, as well as the counter narratives that testify to war’s senseless and ungovernable injuries and suggest openings for resistance.

GMeet link: https://meet.google.com/kjk-wtwy-yqz