"The Smartness Mandate": Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell with Audrey Borowski

Smart Grids. Smart Cities. Smart phones. Smart Medicine. Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and “crisis”. The penetration of almost every part of life by digital technologies has transformed how we understand nature, culture, and time. But how? And for whom? What futures are we imagining, or foreclosing, through our “smart” infrastructures?
This conversation situates this new mandate to be smart and discusses how the humanities and sciences can work together to develop technologies that engage planetary scale problems in more ethical, just, and diverse ways.
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.
Orit Halpern is a Lighthouse Professor and the Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her research is on histories of cybernetics, design, and artificial intelligence. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automating decision making and the second examines the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. Her most recent book (with Robert Mitchell, 2023) is titled "The Smartness Mandate".
Current Project: www.againstcatastrophe.net
Robert Mitchell is Professor of English at Duke University. His current research focuses on relationships among biopolitics, the logic of populations, and the arts, with an emphasis on applications of artificial intelligence and theories of computer-assisted learning. His latest book, "The Smartness Mandate" (co-authored with Orit Halpern) was published last year.
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.