Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 220.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2019-08-30 12:23:24+00:00
        From: Jacqueline Wernimont 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.219: an ethnography of AI systems?

Thanks, Willard, for forwarding this to the group.

Across social media there has been widespread frustration with this piece
and the rhetorical positioning of a "new" field when people in STS, DH, and
Media Studies have been doing this work for quite a while. It doesn't seem
irrelevant to those who are in this space that many of the leading figures
in anthropological and social science approaches to AI are women and
non-binary people who seem to have been ignored here.

I'm currently in conversation with several of those leading scholars about
putting together a summer institute on this topic. I'll be sure to keep the
list updated. I'm also likely to pull together one of my "angry"
bibliographies and will share that as well so that everyone can get a sense
of who has been doing this work in the field, although perhaps not as
highly capitalized as someone at MIT/MaxPlanck.

Warmly,
Jacque

On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 2:51 AM Humanist  wrote:

>                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 219.
>             Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
>                    Hosted by King's Digital Lab
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2019-08-30 05:59:50+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty 
>         Subject: Iyad Rahwan Is the Anthropologist of Artificial
> Intelligence | Quanta Magazine
>
> Thanks to Bill Benzon I've come across an article on someone with
> anthropological inclinations who proposes to do an ethnography of
> AI systems: Iyad Rahwan, Director of the Center for Humans and Machines
> at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development
> (https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de, Berlin). The article may be found
> at
>
>
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/iyad-rahwan-is-the-anthropologist-of-
artificial-
>
> intelligence-20190826?fbclid=IwAR0tc24MD4tlcS2jVChaKbbQnLNKwvfIbUJGN261BQa2CM-
> 
> oyhAtCAxjeNA
>
> and note the article in Nature to which the above refers,
>
> Iyad Rahwan et al, "Machine behaviour". Nature 568
> (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1138-y)
>
> His work may well be worth watching. Of course AI is all the rage,
> and often 'AI' seems little more than handwaving at something or
> other. What seems promising to me here is the anthropological perspective,
> which in this case just may work somewhat to discourage the assumption
> that the entities being observed are on the way to being like ourselves.
> Their defamiliarising otherness is important for all sorts of reasons.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM



_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php

Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
Software designer: Malgosia Askanas (Mind-Crafts)

This site is maintained under a service level agreement by King's Digital Lab.