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- Convenors:
-
Sarah Pink
(Monash University)
Emma Quilty (Monash University)
Debora Lanzeni (Monash University)
Kari Dahlgren (Monash University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel creates an Interdisciplinary Futures focused AI Anthropology, whereby anthropologists might collaborate and shift the narratives in futures-focused spaces where other disciplines currently dominate.
Long Abstract:
The panel calls for papers, films and other media from anthropologists interested in creating a new Interdisciplinary Futures focused AI Anthropology. AI is becoming an inevitable part of life and we need to develop new capacities for anthropologists to work in interdisciplinary futures-focused spaces where other disciplines feel at ease. Our ambition is to develop a high profile publication based on this panel.
We wish to engage in, contest and shift dominant discourses where AI inhabits a future shaped and visioned by techno-solutionist politics and capital flows. Here futures are visioned through existing and anticipated engineering advances in AI capacity, the rise of the consultancies' (Shore & Wright) predictive audits which frame AI as a techno-solution to societal, industry and policy problems, and the short-termist visions of governments complicit in digital capitalism. This context is underpinned by an extractivist approach to ethics, which assumes that if future autonomous, intelligent and connected technologies (eg. such as self-driving cars, digital assistants, robotic workers) are invested with human ethics then people will trust, accept and adopt them, thus enabling predicted futures.
The panel will bring together anthropologists with ambitions to participate theoretically, ethnographically, experimentally and interventionally in interdisciplinary and multistakeholder spaces where futures are envisioned. We are open to different ways of approaching this, but seek to build an engaged and interdisciplinary Futures Anthropology (Pink & Salazar 2017) to undertake anthropology with and in possible futures, to interrogate AI ethics, and which has an ethics of anthropological care and responsibility at its core.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the limitations of the transport sector's visions for the future through the figure of Pod Man. Pod Man has been created to draw attention to the pervasive gendered, classist and racially coded ideas about the future users of automated transport.
Paper long abstract:
This paper introduces the figure of Pod Man who has been created to draw attention to the pervasive gendered, classist and racially coded ideas about the future users of automated transport. This paper focuses on the key discourses imagining the future users of transport by drawing on insights from the content analysis of 58 industry, consultancy and government reports, future projections and strategic plans. While many of these documents promise a future with increased safety, accessibility and productivity, these benefits and freedoms will only be available to certain social groups. Previous research examining visual advertisements for future modes of transport shows how the users of the pod are often depicted as white, professional, able-bodied and male, unburdened by complications of gender, ethnicity, class, (dis)ability or familial responsibilities (Wigley and Rose 2002). This paper extends this idea of ‘users of the pod’ and high-tech cocoons (Urry 2008) through the figure of the Pod Man, to allow for a critical satirisation of these future visions. This paper will create new anthropological insights by engaging with STS and feminist scholarship to examine the socio-technical dimensions of designing automated futures.
Paper short abstract:
Academics often characterise the rise of platform work through dystopian future visions shaped by government, consultancy and industry agendas. This paper draws on interdisciplinary ethnography to analyse how such visions are implicated in the lives of platform workers with AI.
Paper long abstract:
Academics often associate the rise of platform work with dark visions of the future shaped by the various agendas of governments, consultancies, industry and unions. These visions play an important role in how workers deal with the organisation of their everyday working lives and how they interact with the AI technologies that are part of their experiences of work. We show how such future visions permeate the possibilities of progress and change which platform workers imagine in their own technological and work practices. This ranges from their strategies to monetize their work practices to how they organise their own online communities. Our research has found that their future visions are dominated by existing narratives which predict dystopian scenarios cemented by unchangeable bonds of power and enabled through AI. These narratives have an enormous impact on how workers interact with organisations and how they perceive themselves as collective actors.
To develop this we draw on interdisciplinary ethnographic research, between anthropology and communications studies, about platform workers’ digital learning. We outline workers’ perceptions, actions and fears, and argue that these should be the terrain of intervention of critical anthropology. In doing so we argue for a new methodology for possible interventions that anthropologists working interdisciplinary could make against the reification of certain images of capitalism above others.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we explain our tailored design ethnographic approach in the multi-stakeholder future AI-driven mobilities project AHA II (2018-2022), and demonstrate how it was used to reframe technology-driven visions of efficient and individualised transport rooted in people’s everyday lives.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we discuss how a design ethnographic approach enables anthropological perspectives to become part of a co-creative multi-stakeholder innovation project across public and private actors. We advocate for a design ethnography that is helpful in imagining, anticipating and realising possible futures by playing in people’s everyday lives rather than playing against technology- and capital-driven innovation agendas (Pink et al. 2022, Smith et al. 2016). Based on a collaborative research and innovation project on future AI-driven mobilities (AHA 2018-2022), we explored the first and last mile of travel that people do when they leave their homes in two diverse suburban communities in southern Sweden. Through empirical examples we will demonstrate how materials from ethnographic fieldwork, in combination with design-oriented multi-stakeholder workshops, were used to co-create insights about what could be worst and best case scenarios for these communities. Through this process we could reframe what is commonly portrayed by both public and private actors as utopian design visions of efficient and individualised mobility, into questionable and contrasting narratives about the fabric of our social lives and decision-making processes in everyday rural and urban communities. We will end with presenting the pedagogical implications of this design ethnographic process - how such reframings can be steered into creating viable co-learning routes for real-life based, ethical and people-centered design opportunities and future transport mobilities.