AI and the ”Real World” – Medieteknik Live

Medieteknik Live / Open lecture in Media Technology with David Ribes

Since the 1960s, AI researchers have invoked the ‘real world’— often in quotes —as both a mystery and a target. But in AI worlds there is also something else, something beyond, above or below the ’real world’, and which AI experts sometimes call ’domain independence’. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, this talk traces how this unchanging relation has persisted across the very different approaches and technologies of symbolic AI, expert systems, machine learning, and generative AI. By examining these two concepts together — the real world and a science that seeks to be independent of it — we can better understand how AI practitioners develop an abstract universality that is about no specific part of the ’real world’, and yet somehow applicable to all of it.

BIO
David Ribes is professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) and director of the Data Ecologies Lab (deLAB) at the University of Washington. He is a sociologist of science and technology who focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures (i.e., networked information technologies for the support of interdisciplinary science); their relation to long-term changes in the conduct of science; and, transformations in objects of research. His forthcoming book (2026), ‘Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures’ is a sociotechnical inspection of the concept of interoperability, tracking the trajectory of three HIV/AIDS cohort studies as they combined over three decades. See davidribes.com for more.

16 september kl.13

Plats: Svarta lådan, MB313, Södertörns högskola
This open lecture is arranged by MT-Live, the higher seminar series of Media Technology and Media and Communications Studies, and the research platform Digital transformations
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