"Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts": N.Katherine Hayles with Audrey Borowski

Arguably, AI is the most important cultural adaptation since the invention of language, and it is moving ahead at light speed – way beyond our ability to regulate or even comprehend it. This discussion will explain the basics of the Transformer architecture that powers ChatGPT and similar AIs and explore their implications for our collective futures and political processes. This event is part of the “AI and the Digital” series. This series will explore how AI and other digital technologies are influenced by concepts of the human and how they can be designed to be responsible, socially just and ecologically sustainable. Together with international experts, participants are invited to discuss the entanglement of thought and technology. N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is the author of numerous books and is currently working on a book called Technosymbiosis: Futures of the Human. Academic Homepage: https://english.ucla.edu/people-facul... Audrey Borowski is a research fellow with the Desirable Digitalisation project, a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Cambridge that investigates how to design AI and other digital technologies in responsible ways. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...