AI Utopia, AI Dystopia^EN

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves researches the intersections between sociology of design and technology, politics of fiction and collaborative practices. He is interested in the entanglements between discursive practices and material phenomena in technology development, especially focusing on the convergence between narrative artifacts, infrastructures, data, epistemology, democracy and industrial outlets. He is the co-founder of Becoming, an emerging scenarios research studio, and associate professor on critical thinking, artistic and design research, and speculative design at Escola Massana, Elisava and Istituto Europeo di Design.

In the field of art and culture, he has performed, researched with, or collaborated with MACBA, Hangar, CCCB, Tecnopolítica-IN3/UOC, Sónar +D (Barcelona), STRP (Eindhoven), UNESCO (Montevideo), The Wrong Biennale (International), Medialab Prado (Madrid), Primer (New York) among others. His work has been published in several media studies and design journals.

Alison Powell is the Director of the JUST AI network. She is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research examines how people’s values influence the way technology is built, and how ethics in practice unfolds in technology design contexts. Alison experiments with participatory and public engagement methods to investigate how we generate knowledge about technology, citizenship, and our futures. Her previous projects include the Horizon 2020-funded VIRT-EU, which examined ways to develop ethics in practice among Internet of Things developer communities, and Understanding Automated Decisions, which considered the possibility and consequences of explaining how algorithms work using design methods and an interactive public exhibition. Alison also shares her insights about how people make knowledge about the city through ‘data walking’ – see datawalking.org– and her public writing at http://www.alisonpowell.ca.

Imre is a Research Officer in JUST AI and a PhD candidate in Social Research Methodology at the LSE. He studied Philosophy in Vienna and holds an MSc in Biomedicine and Society from the LSE. His doctoral work looks at human enhancement technologies and draws on quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how different values inform public attitudes. In the past, Imre had worked on a variety of projects, including an EU FP7 effort studying the ethical acceptability and social desirability of neuro-enhancement technologies, and freelance research for Nesta on AI governance and innovation-enabling regulatory approaches. He recently co-edited a volume on the ethical dimensions of commercial and DIY neurotechnologies. Imre is passionate about new forms of facilitating societal reflection on desirable futures and he is the founder of Hack the Senses, a design collective at the interface of the arts and the sciences. In JUST AI, he works mainly on mapping and analysing the UK AI ethics landscape.

Louise Hickman is a senior researcher with the JUST AI network. She is an activist and scholar of communication and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. Her current project focuses on the automation of care and access work, particularly the use of real-time transcription by freelance workers. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labor, technological systems, and economic models and conditions. Louise has previously served as a convenor of UC San Diego’s Feminist Labor Lab and a member UCSD’s Design Lab and the Critical Design Lab . She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego , and is currently working on her first manuscript: “The Automation of Access.”

Nicole Brandstetter studied English and French literature and language at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and the Université de la Bretagne Occidentale / Brest (France). After her studies, while obtaining her doctorate, she worked in an interdisciplinary research group in a graduate programme on the analysis of aesthetic lies. In 2005, she gained her PhD in Romance studies (French literature) on the topic of strategies of stage- managed inauthenticity in the postmodern French novel. After that, she worked as PR manager and was responsible for projects and campaigns for customers from various business areas. Afterwards, she worked for 10 years in a private educational institute. Besides teaching English and French she was deputy head of school and later provisional head of school. She managed the organisational development process and was responsible for human resource management, marketing, public relations, and development of the educational programme concerning didactics and content. In September 2015, she was appointed professor for English at the University of Applied Sciences Munich (Germany), where she is now not only responsible for the English modules of the general electives in the Department of General and Interdisciplinary Studies, but also for integrated language programmes for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. Her areas of expertise and research interests are scholarship of teaching and learning, narratives in the digital age, and concepts of authenticity, inauthenticity, and lying in literature.

Je suis Assistant Professor de littérature française et francophone des 20e et 21e siècles. Mes dernières publications incluent Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities (Lexington Books 2020, collection « After the Empire: the Francophone World and Postcolonial France » ), « Lampedusa, ou la nuit de l'Europe. à ce stade de la nuit de Maylis de Kerengal » (French Cultural Studies, Volume 30:1 (2019): 65- 79), « Impérialismes alternatifs: Le cosmopolitisme dans Kamal Jann de Dominique Eddé » (International Journal of Francophone Studies, Volume 21, Numbers 1&2 (2018): 69- 86) .

Dr Stephen Cave is Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, all at the University of Cambridge. At CFI, he oversees a team of researchers across five programmes on the nature and impact of AI in the short and long term. His own research is in philosophy of technology, in particular critical perspectives on AI, robotics and life-extension technologies. In addition to his research and writing, he has served in the British Diplomatic Service and advised a range of governmental and international bodies. He is author of the book Immortality (Penguin Random House 2012), a New Scientist book of the year, and co-editor of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (OUP 2020).

Dr Kanta Dihal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on science narratives, particularly those that emerge from conflict. She leads two research projects, Global AI Narratives and Decolonizing AI, in which she focuses on the portrayals and perceptions of artificial intelligence across cultures. She is co-editor of AI Narratives (Oxford, 2020) and has advised the World Economic Forum, the UK House of Lords, and the United Nations. She obtained her DPhil on the communication of quantum physics at Oxford in 2018.