Dear all,
You are kindly invited to the following three events, organised by the PCAI collective. If you would like to attend one of the events, please register by sending an email to judith.van.lookeren.campagne[at]vub.be and m.niedda[at]uu.nl.
Paper presentation (09/04/2025) - 5pm to 6pm CET (online)
On the 9th of April, we are excited to welcome Asher Kessler, who will present his latest paper "Longtermism, Big Tech, and the Rebalancing of Historical Time: A Benjaminian Critique", in which he discusses the perception and valuation of time in the big tech industry in the Silicon Valley. Asher is currently finishing his PhD at LSE in the Media and Communications department. His research focuses on Facebook/Meta, where he examines how high-level actors in and around the company came to think and speak about time, space, and their ability to change the world around them. He analyses how actors in and around Facebook/Meta utilise the language and times of progress and exponentiality to produce a sense of historical time which is preoccupied with the future. For more information about his research, you can consult his website: https://asherkessler.com/
The session will take place from 5pm to 6pm CET on the 09/04/2025. There will be a 20-minute presentation followed by a Q&A and discussion. The session will be online.
The PCAI Meets (23/05/2025) - one day event (hybrid)
During this one day event, members of the PCAI will meet at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to present their research on questions pertaining to philosophy, critique, and 'AI'. Each presentation is followed by a discussion. Everybody is welcome to join and participate. More information with a fully finalised programme will follow in April. It will be possible to join us online as well.
Reading session (18/06/2025) - from 5pm to 7pm CET (online)
To wrap up the academic year, we organise a final reading and discussion session on the question ‘What’s ‘Good’ in ‘Good AI’? We will be discussing a chapter from Simon Lindgren’s Critical Theory of AI (2023) and an article written by Mona Simion entitled "Two Dilemmas for Value-Sensitive Technological Design" (2024) in the Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies handbook. The aim is to (notably) discuss our preconceptions of what a 'good', less harmful or evaluative AI could be/is thought to be in our current neoliberal economy.
The international collective Philosophy, Critique, and 'AI' (PCAI) consists of early career researchers working on questions regarding ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) from a predominantly philosophical perspective. The PCAI group seeks to foster space for politicised philosophical reflection on ‘AI’, while refusing to succumb to overly simplistic characterisations of either ‘salvation’ or ‘demise’. Being a collective, PCAI creates such space through various activities. The group is for early career scholars at any stage in their PhD/post-doc working on critical philosophical approaches to ‘AI’. The collective understands techno-scientific practices to be situated within social structures that are in turn embedded in logics of domination. As such, we recognise that political reflections on ‘AI’ should be approached through a plurality of different critical theoretical (e.g., sociopolitical, epistemic, normative) lenses, which pertain to minoritised (e.g., feminist, decolonial, queer) perspectives. Ultimately, the aims of the PCAI are twofold: to reflect on how and why critical theorisations are carried out, but also to question how the term ‘AI’ is (continuously) constructed, used, en enforced.
The PCAI was initiated by Marilou Niedda (Utrecht University) and ETHU-member Judith Campagne (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).