[Afridig] CFP March Workshop on the Humanities and Machine Learning

[Keith Breckenridge]

Dear friends,

Please find the CFP for the March workshop below.  Shout if you see a
problem (before we send it out to the known universe.)

Thanks, k
-----------------------
Between Cyberutopia and Cyberphobia : the Humanities on the African
continent in the Era of Machine LearningThursday, 7 March, 2019 - 11:00

*Please complete this form <https://goo.gl/forms/vuFFMqeTuMYYa1g62> if you
would like to join us for this event.*



This workshop takes its focus from the upheaval in popular and scholarly
understandings of the intellectual (and political) prospects of the
networked planet. A decade ago advocates and precocious users were
celebrating the levelling, democratic and disruptive possibilities of the
Internet, and of social media platforms in particular.  Today an elaborated
loathing of these technologies and their political effects -- succinctly
captured by the Channel 4 series Black Mirror -- has become common and
politically compelling. Popular and scholarly disillusionment with the
promises of the network society is now close to self-evident, and the
subject of daily reports in the major international newspapers.  Much more
difficult to assess is the critical and political power of the dystopian
critique of cybernetics (of which Black Mirror is only the most recent
compelling example) that emerges from the humanist tradition. In this
workshop we propose an assessment of these two movements, and their mutual
engagement, in the special circumstances of the African university.



The combination of ubiquitous social media, feedback-centred devices and
the sorting and predictive techniques of machine-learning, now released
from the old constraints on data-processing, seems to present an
existential danger to the long-established habits of disciplinary enquiry
in the humanities. These carefully engineered features of the global
network affect young and old alike. An explosion of source materials -- to
focus only on the most obvious problem --  has been combined with a
technological order of continuous distraction, where user-produced data
(much of it in text form) has become the key profit-driver for the
wealthiest firms in the world. In this new global economy, and in the
simplest formulation, it is the absence of uninterrupted time that makes
the spontaneous development of the post-Renaissance ethic of self-directed
reading increasingly untenable. It is this concern that drives the deep and
persuasive pessimism about the production, consumption and meanings of
digital content, and devices, that now dominates the humanities.



In this workshop we will focus on the intellectual and philosophical claims
of machine learning as both a subject of humanist enquiry and as the key
set of skills and technologies shaping the workings of the network society.
Precisely because the field is concerned with the engineering of
consciousness the history and contemporary debates in machine learning are
philosophically sophisticated, richly informed by the old core problems of
humanism, and many of the key technological claims are evaluated, within
the engineering disciplines, using the old philosophical arguments.  The
most influential and persuasive scholarly accounts of the current state and
future prospects of artificial intelligence are those that take this
history of philosophical and institutional conflict as a guide to its
future. Likewise it is the researchers working in this field -- especially
the youngest researchers -- who are most alert to the potential for the new
technologies to renew and entrench the oldest structures of inequality and
preoccupied with developing automated remedies. It is important to
acknowledge that this acute sensitivity to the philosophical and political
critique of machine learning gives the humanities unusual leverage in
contemporary debates.



These questions are, we believe, especially acute on the African
continent.  There is, already, a long list of the well-articulated
political and intellectual dangers for Africans that follow from the
development of generalised tools of machine learning. The most obvious
derive from the dense, hidden and ingrained structures of racism. There are
also problems of bias that result from the absence of high-quality training
datasets -- for example of African names or facial images or words. A third
obvious risk is that AI will exaggerate the already existing brutal
deficits of infrastructure – of high-speed network connections, reliable
power supplies, data processing centres and, especially, of human
expertise. Many experts worry that the growing power of the centres of
artificial intelligence in the United States and China – and the global
monopoly power of a small number of firms secured by AI -- will produce a
new era of data-driven extraversion and dependency that will remove the
decisive philosophical and political deliberations from the continent. And
there is the intractable problem of formal work itself in the face of a
global movement to automation. A less obvious and thus controversial
question for the humanities on the African continent and abroad is whether
these new tools will support insidious and powerful infrastructures of
social ordering. Companies that specialise in the technologies of
surveillance and social scoring that the Chinese state is fostering have
already found easy accommodation in the African countries -- including
Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda -- that share a common vision of
bureaucratic control and surveillance and weak privacy laws.  As the
wealthiest societies in the Americas, Europe and Asia have begun over the
last two years to propose meaningful regulation of the digital economy,
some of the most influential figures are arguing that the unrestricted, and
welcoming, economies on this continent can serve -- like China thirty years
ago -- as an unregulated laboratory of networked innovation. This is the
second troubled, concern that drives heated debates.



After several decades of naive optimism the humanities have reached a
moment of bad-tempered critical reflection that offers productive insights
into the strengths of the disciplines, the priorities for the future and
opportunities that may still be realised in the networked society.  These
questions have particular urgency on the African continent where the
weakness of the humanities, the limits of regulatory constraint, the
offshoring of data-processing, and elites’, donors’ and states’ enthusiasm
for automated tools of surveillance and social ordering suggest the
possibility that the networked dystopia that is much worried about in the
rich countries may first take form here.

In this workshop we invite proposals for papers that consider the following
or related problems:

   1. What can we learn from the intellectual history and philosophical
   debates within the fields of artificial intelligence about the prospects of
   these technologies and their relationships with the humanities?  What
   exactly do we mean by the well-worn popular descriptions of Artificial
   Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cybernetics?
   2. Does the universal distribution of attention-mining social media
   represent an inescapable existential danger to the (often unconscious)
   intellectual habits on which the humanities have been established?
   3. Does the development of ubiquitous and automated scoring -- of either
   the Chinese or American kind -- subvert the normative and political
   ambitions of the core disciplines of the humanities -- of philosophy,
   political studies, religion, literature?
   4. Conversely, are the grand -- and obviously naive -- claims currently
   being made about the social and political implications of machine learning
   especially vulnerable to dystopian humanist critique?
   5. Will the universally distributed network, and the open-sourcing of
   the tools and platforms of machine learning, strengthen or weaken African
   universities and research, and the humanities disciplines within them?
   6. What opportunities and remedies are available for those who seek to
   disrupt the ordering and extractive logics at work on the network?  Can we
   use the same -- or similar -- technologies to achieve contradictory ends?

Proposed panels

   - What is Machine Learning ?  History, technology politics
   - What is the relationship between the Humanities and Machine Learning?
   - Automating African Authoritarianism and the Alternatives

The second day of this workshop will be devoted to the assessment of
proposals for funding from the Programme of African Digital Humanities
<https://wiser.wits.ac.za/page/programme-african-digital-humanities-2018-2023-13069>
.


-------
Keith Breckenridge  *W I S E R* - The Wits Institute for Social and
Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits,
 Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 | Phone +27(0)11-7174272 | Web:
wiser.wits.ac.za
| <http://wiser.wits.ac.za> *Biometric State*, CUP, Sept 2014
<http://goo.gl/nJKK5N> | Co - Editor, Journal of African History
<http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AFH>.
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