Fritz Sessions: The Future of Artificial Intelligence
Hello! It's been a while.
A bit over two years ago, you signed up to receive occasional updates on the Fritz Sessions, a series of events at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. The inaugural session took place in May 2019, with a lecture by Prof. Johan Rockström, presenting the current state of climate science and discussing his agenda for managing the future of our climate.
Finally, the time has come for another session:
The next Fritz Session, titled "The Future of Artificial Intelligence", will take place on 16 September, at 15:30 CEST, online at fritz-sessions.org.
Increasingly sophisticated machine learning systems are being developed and deployed around the world. As they become embedded into our lives and shape our future, they also become entangled with existing socio-economic structures. Any understanding of what lies ahead must therefore include not only the technical, but also the political.
To investigate this urgent topic, this session will feature a talk titled Atlas of AI: mapping the politics of artificial intelligence by Prof. Kate Crawford, a leading scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence, exploring the large-scale deployment of machine learning systems and their intersection with existing systems of power. The lecture will be followed by a discussion with the audience and conclude with a virtual reception.
The session also includes an exhibition of artworks by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, providing an artistic perspective on the possibilities of machine learning.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, we'll hold the event online and stream it live. On the day, we'll send another update through this newsletter, and post the stream on fritz-sessions.org.
That's the rough overview. Let's get into the details!
FS02: The Future of Artificial Intelligence
Speaker
Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on understanding large-scale data systems in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. She is a Research Professor of Communication and Science and Technology Studies at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney.
Over her twenty year research career, she has also produced groundbreaking creative collaborations and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Beazley Design of the Year Award, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A in London. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen produced Training Humans – the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems.
Crawford's latest book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press) has been described as “a fascinating history of data” by the New Yorker, a “timely and urgent contribution” by Science and named one of the best books on technology in 2021 by the Financial Times.
Exhibition
Holly Herndon is an American composer, musician, and artist based in Berlin. Her musical work explores the interplay between voice and computation, manipulating vocals to create new, deeply personal, virtual instruments. Herndon's most recent album, Proto, created with her partner Mat Dryhurst, features an "AI choir" named Spawn, trained on volunteer vocal performances.
Crossing the Interface
Crossing the Interface is a series of short animations generated with the CLIP model released by OpenAI, based on excerpts of a text of the same title commissioned from Reza Negarestani, a philosopher and writer, in 2013. The process of creating images with such models requires the artist to provide short pieces of text ("prompts") as input, which are then interpreted by the model and turned into an image. Creating an animation therefore turns into an interactive negotiation, a dialogue, with a non-human actor, pointing towards the possibilities of AI enabling new avenues of self-expression, and providing a direction beyond simple narratives of AI replacing human creativity.
A little preview can be found on the event website...
And that's it! We're very excited about this, and look forward to seeing you in September.
In the meantime here is the video of the first Fritz Session, The Future of Our Climate:
See you soon! 🤖
-- Marcel (on behalf of the Fritz Sessions team)