We are collaborating with Shazeda Ahmed (Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice) to organize a series of seminars around the applications of AI to both studying AI as an object of inquiry and discerning the inherent trade-offs in uses of machine learning in research.
Talk by Joshua F. Dienstag, University of Wisconsin-Madison. This talk addresses the challenge that talking machines pose to traditional conceptions of the human is profound. If language activity is crucial to human status, then why should we not include talking machines in our community? What are our grounds for distinguishing computer-generated language from human language?
A two-day workshop held on December 12 and 13, 2024, at UCLA, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’, the workshop consists in 15 core members composed of faculty and graduate students, who will meet together in 6 sessions, each of 90 minutes, held across two successive days.
Livescu Faculty Seminars where faculty meets to discuss specific topics about the latest research and developments in the field of AI, neuroscience, and sociology, among others. During Fall 2024 quarter we had five meetings with several guests.
Inaugural workshop held during September 2024 at the Institute for Society & Genetics at UCLA on the topic of midcentury brain science. Cross-fertilizing cultural, political, intellectual, and technical-scientific history, this workshop’s contributions ask: How did the midcentury brain sciences ramify across cultural and political discourses, and simultaneously, how did these discourses shape the technical affordances and practices of these brain sciences?
Talk by Emily Hogdson Anderson, University of South California titled Ghostwriting: A Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write
What is ghostwriting? Understood broadly as the act of one person writing in another person’s name, the practice has—according to many ghostwriters—been around since written language itself. And yet the implementation, and acknowledgment, of this practice have varied greatly over time. Who are these invisible figures? Why do they do what they do? And why do they remain disembodied—behind the scenes?
In part a cultural history of this mysterious and intuitively captivating profession, in part an exposé of how contemporary professional ghostwriting works, this public lecture uses ghostwriting to animate the questions posed by the No Body Problem inaugural event.
This May we will hold an inaugural workshop to kick off a new project, “The No-Body-Problem,” developed by Sarah Tindal Kareem (UCLA) and Sean Silver (Rutgers). “The No-Body Problem” names a cluster of concerns that emerge from the proliferation, in the eighteenth century, of new forms of remote media–epistles, periodicals, novels–the very forms of which engaged the question: how do utterances operate differently when there is nobody there to utter them?
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