Online Open Session: Ethical and Epistemic Questions in the Era of AI

On 7 October at 17:00, MeLCi Lab will host the online session Ethical and Epistemic Questions in the Era of AI, featuring Dr Daniel Cardoso. Held via Microsoft Teams, the session invites participants to critically reflect on the language, assumptions, and material structures surrounding so-called artificial intelligence. The talk will examine the ethical, epistemic, political, and economic implications of generative technologies, challenging technologically deterministic understandings of their development and use.

Abstract

Epistemology – understood as a precondition to the attribution of truth value to any given statement – requires us to understand the constraints and traditions that different words bring to a debate, just as ethics requires us to consider the symbolic and material impacts of our actions, including the performativity of the words we use.
Engaging with two of the most complex concepts in both the Social Sciences and Humanities – ‘Artificial’ and ‘Intelligence’ – this talk joins a growing number of academic work that argues for scholars to stop using this misnomer, in the name of both ethics, and scientific accuracy.
It then moves to consider the materiality of probabilistic generative models as deeply reliant on embodied human activity, and on maximising extractive processes that involve both human and more-than-human processes, while simultaneously working to obfuscate that dependency.
In this sense, “critical AI literacies” can be perceived as an oxymoron, but also as a conceptual artefact produced through the attempted epistemic shifts brought about by the neoliberal deployment of probabilistic generative models.
Emphasising the political, material and economic context of the deployment of any technology is fundamental to preclude tecnodeterministic facile analyses – and, equally so, to understand how the same technical systems can be mobilised differently.

About the speaker

Dr. Daniel Cardoso holds a PhD in Communication Sciences by the NOVA University of Lisbon. They are an Associate Professor at the Lusófona University, and a Guest Assistant Professor at the NOVA University of Lisbon. Their research areas focuses on nonmonogamies, BDSM, gender and sexualities, digital platformization, youth and new media, and cybercultures.