THE FUTURE OF AI: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ASPECTS
Online lecture series

Joanna Zylinska (King’s College London)
Nonhuman Creativity : Artificial Imagination : Human Anticipation

Drawing on her philosophical work and her art practice, Joanna Zylinska will interrogate whether we can actively mobilise nonhuman creativity as a way of opening up our all too human ways of thinking and acting. She will also explore whether AI, rooted as it is in the extractivitst logic of the tech industry, can overcome its own material conditions of existence. Could AI play the role of a philosopher-visionary that will show us a way out of the current socio-political impasse? Could it get beyond the limitations of our human frames of mind to imagine a different set of propositions and arrangements for us? Could it help us envisage a better future?

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, artist and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is the author of a number of books – including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020), The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017) and Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014). Zylinska is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects, often on an open-access basis. Her own art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to map out scenarios for alternative futures. Her new book, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in November.

This lecture is a part of The Future of AI: Social and Cultural Aspects online lecture series that brings international experts to discuss the philosophy of AI, AI and post-digital aesthetics, cultural impacts of AI, AI (in) art, non-human agency, AI-driven social transformations, and, more generally, our coexistence with AI and digital technologies in all aspects of daily life. The series is organized by the Digital Society Lab [DigLab] of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.