Join us for a free public seminar hosted at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) to launch the AI & Life Matters research stream. These online seminars will explore the ambivalent nature of digital technologies—as tools of both oppression and emancipation—and how their underlying cultural values shape the political landscape of the 21st century. We will particular attention to infrastructures of empire and how digital technologies increasingly shape and mediate the culture-nature continuum of societies in late capitalism.
Framing Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a pharmacological force—capable of harm, healing, and serving as an alibi—the discussion will question current ethical and political debates that often overlook the structural violence embedded in AI-driven systems. Key themes include:
Algorithmic Warfare: Examining AI's role in military violence, particularly the use of AI in warfare, to expose how states scale oppression through digital power.
Ecological Crisis: Debunking the myth of "ethical AI" by revealing its extractive infrastructures and their incompatibility with planetary justice in the Anthropocene.
Feminist Critique: Unpacking the contradictions of "care ethics" in AI systems operating under white-supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, showing how such frameworks often reinforce fascist regimes of oppression rather than dismantle it.
Bridging political philosophy, feminist theory, and ecological thought, this seminar calls for a radical reimagining of technology—away from systems of domination and toward community-rooted alternatives that repair, undo, or bypass the programmed hierarchies of life and death in our current order.
Venue: Online
Admission: Free & Open to the Public
Registration: click here or scan the QR-code