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54th Annual Academy of the Humanities Symposium – Between humans & machines: exploring the pasts & futures of automation
16 November 2023 - 17 November 2023
Convened by ADM+S Centre Directors Prof Jean Burgess FAHA and Prof Julian Thomas FAHA, the 54th Annual Academy of the Humanities Symposium will explore the possibilities and hazards of automation, and the complexities of human-machine relations.
Since the late eighteenth century, the changing ‘machinery question’ has continued to spark deep social divisions and to stimulate new fields of imaginative thinking, creative speculation, and social and cultural enquiry (including political economy, cybernetics, STS, AI ethics, critical data studies, and digital ethnography).
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have generated new interests, methods, problems, and capabilities across an array of humanities and creative arts disciplines. These have complicated conventional narratives of technological transformation, enabling a deeper understanding of the possibilities and hazards of automation, and the complexities of human-machine relations.
The 54th Annual Academy Symposium will explore some of the most exciting work underway on these issues across the humanities with related institutions and industry fields, in Australia and elsewhere.
Topics will include:
- Virtual autopsies and automated morgues,
- The automation of cultural production and cultural taste,
- Human accountability for the actions of machines,
- The ‘explanatory imperative’
- Questions of Indigenous data sovereignty
- Digital human rights
This event will be held in-person at RMIT University’s Kaleide Theatre in Melbourne.
For further updates, please check the Australian Academy of the Humanities website.
LOCATION
This event will be held in-person at RMIT University’s Kaleide Theatre in Melbourne.
CONVENERS
This year’s symposium will be convened by ADM+S Centre Directors Prof Jean Burgess FAHA and Prof Julian Thomas FAHA.
Prof Jean Burgess FAHA
Jean is Associate Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) where she is the co-leader of the Data program, and convenor of the QUT node.
Prof Julian Thomas FAHA
Julian is Director of the ADM+S Centre and a Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
SPEAKERS
We’re delighted to announce the following speakers for our program. Further details on their sessions, other speakers and the full program will be announced soon.
Dr Melissa Gregg
Melissa is an internationally recognised research pioneer with deep technical expertise in user experience, sustainability, silicon and platform architecture and workplace transformation.
Malavika Jayaram
Malavika is the Executive Director of the Digital Asia Hub, an independent, non-profit internet and society research think tank based out of Hong Kong with a regional focus.
Dr Erica Thompson
Erica is an Associate Professor of Modelling for Decision Making at the University College London’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy.
2023 HANCOCK LECTURE
ADM+S Research Fellow Dr Thao Phan from Monash University is the featured 2023 Hancock Lecture speaker. Titled ‘Artificial figures: gender-in-the-making in algorithmic culture’, Dr Phan will explore how, in the making of AI systems and technologies, gender too is being made.
Dr Thao Phan
Thao’s lecture centres on questions of power, politics, and identity in today’s algorithmic culture. It asks: how are more-than-human systems reconfiguring the terms of all-too-human categories like gender, race, and class? How does gender influence how new technologies are made intelligible, mediating the expectations of a user, consumer, or audience? And finally, how might these encounters with AI reveal the artifice of gender as a system that is tied to the realm of the artificial as much as it is to nature and what we call ‘the natural’?
ORGANISERS
The 54th Annual Academy Symposium is presented by the Australian Academy of the Humanities in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
ENQUIRIES
Please contact the Australian Academy of the Humanities if you have any questions about the Symposium: enquiries@humanities.org.au