How did algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligence become the inevitable answer to global challenges? Political rationality is rising across the world which situates emerging technology as key to social, political, and economic transformations. National security questions are increasingly approached through algorithmic realities while humanitarian action to govern precarious lives becomes entangled with big tech companies and start-ups. Yet these technologies also seem to amplify existing hierarchies and replicate social divisions, themselves products of historical and contemporary politics of exclusion, prompting us to ask: What visions of societal progress are imagined through emerging technology? What is the prospect for collective action and democratic imaginaries in the context of these new rationalities?
Join this inquisitive talk moderated by our postdoctoral researchers, Randon Taylor, Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, with Claudia Aradau, Professor Dr in International Politics at King’s College University London, and our RPA’s Principal Investigator and Professor in Digital Humanities Tobias Blanke.