AAG Annual Meeting Call for Papers 2018: New Orleans
Surplus Lives, Race, and Artificial Intelligence
Session organizers
Kate Hall, Dartmouth College, [log in to unmask]
Ian Shaw, University of Glasgow, [log in to unmask]
Anxieties over artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and systems of automated governance are well documented. The contemporary collision between AI and human labor is generating
both old and new problematics for the worlds in which we dwell. The contradictions of capitalist technics and what Marx called “species being” are well-worn ideas. But we might ask how new geographies of poverty, biopolitics, and necropolitics are being manifest
by AI. Moreover, beneath concerns with “robots taking our jobs,” big data, or mass algorithmic surveillance, it’s vital to ask how artificial intelligences are entrenching, policing, and exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. For example, in Dark
Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Simone Browne analyses the historical conditions of surveilling blackness, thereby situating surveillance within transatlantic slavery and its brutal lines of descent. This demonstrates the politico-ethical
importance of fusing capitalist technics with established indignities and injustices. It further points to the importance of interrogating the epistemological frameworks supporting AI and how the human and surplus lives are constructed. That is not to denounce
AI as inherently dystopian (a reading that bulldozes difference)—but to always question its geographic materialization or worlding with state and corporate power. In this session, we aim to do just that: discuss the links between surplus populations,
inequality, race, and AI.
If you are interested in taking part in this session, please contact Kate and Ian with an abstract of no more than 250 words by Friday 20th October 2018 (earlier the better!). We will then get back to you by Monday 23 October with a decision.