HOW TO PARTICIPATE

Zoom Meeting ID: 931 5248 3217 (LINK)

Passcode: 331064

(Note: For this event, the number of Zoom participants outside of the University of Michigan is limited on a first-come, first-served basis. If you do not have a umich.edu Zoom login the event may be full.)

TITLE

Anti-racist AI

SPEAKER

Kalindi Vora, Yale

ABSTRACT

This talk looks at the history of intelligence and race science to consider how these becomes embedded in approaches to developing machine intelligence. I argue that the design of commercial machines that interact socially with humans inscribes histories of racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonization onto projected future social and material worlds as machines become infrastructure for how we become human subjects. These critiques create a position from which to think pragmatically about how to change technology design imaginaries towards anti-racism. Feminist science and technology studies scholars have scrutinized the relation between human and non-human as a key point for understanding how social and political context and the material world coproduce one another. Insights from women of color feminisms, feminist materialism, postcolonial feminisms, indigenous feminism and Black feminism about the role of embodiment, imagination, and labor point out the danger and inaccuracy of taking the material world as given, even though scientific practice insists on just that. I’ll conclude by sharing thought experiments I’ve done with students on what a non-colonized, anti-racist feminist artificial intelligence could be, and by raising some unanswerable questions about intelligence in hopes that we can discuss the potential to challenge the seeming givenness of our colonized world and the way it shapes new technologies.

SPEAKER BIO

Kalindi Vora is Visiting Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and of Ethnicity Race and Migration at Yale University, with secondary appointment in History of Science and Medicine. She is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at UC Davis, and Director of the Feminist Research Institute, and affiliate faculty of Science and Technology Studies. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015; winner of the 4S 2018 Rachel Carson book prize); and with Neda Atanasoski, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures, (Duke University Press, 2019). Her current research includes study of feminist approaches to artificial intelligence and robotics engineering, and developing approaches to antiracist STEM research training informed by ethnic studies and STS research. Her PhD is from History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz (Feminist Studies), and her MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hawai‘i Manoa. She also held the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley Anthropology. Her publications appear in journals including Current Anthropology, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Somatechnics, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Postmodern Culture, Radical Philosophy, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

This event is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information.