AI through the looking glass:
Interdisciplinary insights into challenges and risks
Interdisciplinary insights into challenges and risks
Registration
You will receive the Zoom link to follow the seminar remotely, together with the announcements of the talks and further updates, only after registering through the following form.
Aims and scope
The idea of setting up this interdisciplinary seminar emerged from the observation that the current development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) goes far beyond technological innovation. AI is rapidly transforming scientific working methods, research processes, higher education, knowledge transfer and many other aspects of our society at a pace that requires continuous dialogue across disciplines. Many of the questions arising from these developments can be adequately addressed only through collaboration between mathematics, computer science, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
With this seminar series, we aim to create an international forum based in the Berlin-Brandenburg area that regularly brings together researchers from different disciplines and enables a scientifically grounded, interdisciplinary exchange on the latest developments and their long-term consequences.
Contact
ai.and.the.looking.glass (at) gmail.com
Forthcoming sessions
Note: The titles, abstracts and slides of the previous talks are available on the "Previous talk" page of this website.
Friday, November 6th (Potsdam)
10am Sylvy Anscombe (Université Paris Cité)
"Begin at the beginning… then stop": mathematics in the age of AI, the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Abstract: AI systems now do mathematics: quickly, forcefully, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes still very stupidly. By the standards we have long set ourselves, with prizes for solving the great problems, this must count as progress of a sort. Yet the same tools may change mathematics beyond recognition. Is this the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end? And can we, or should we, stop?
I will speak as a working mathematician who is torn. I am wary of revolutions and of a discipline shaped by large private companies, and worried about ecological cost, unequal access, attribution, and results arriving faster than human understanding. But I cannot simply dismiss a tool of real scientific value.
I will argue that the answer depends less on the machines than on what we decide mathematics is for, and what it is about. The ethical questions depend heavily on the task, and AI use should be disclosed. Above all, the heart of mathematics, thinking and explaining together, is ours to keep unless we give it up
Wednesday, November 11th (Berlin)
IMoS 3003 on the 3rd floor
4pm - Guilherme Coelho (TU Berlin)
"Through the Latent Glass: Hyperreproduction and the Dead Internet"
Abstract: Within a few years, generative AI has made the production of text, images, sound and video seamless and immediate. This lecture argues that this shift constitutes a new media condition, hyperreproduction, in which cultural artefacts are generated as endlessly variable instantiations from learned representational spaces: copies without originals, drawn from a substrate of absorbed material. Driven by platform capitalism, it produces content at scales and velocities that outpace the perceptual and evaluative horizons of any individual, institution, or archive. Its most visible effect is the latent flood: hyperreal synthetic material saturating feeds and catalogues, with platforms like Suno already generating more music every two weeks than Spotify's entire catalogue. Read through critical theory and media theory from Adorno to Kittler, latent space appears as the medium of this regime, and the platforms that own it as its new culture industry. The lecture identifies and theorises a constellation of interlocking conditions that constitute hyperreproduction: latent floods, semiotic deflation, the liquefaction of the cultural object, infrastructural capture, recursive loops, latent enclosures, the autosimulacral turn, contextual voids, Dead Internet dynamics, and the post-authentic condition, arguing that hyperreproduction operates simultaneously across individual, platform, cultural, and ecosystemic levels as both a condition and a structurally accelerating tendency of contemporary media ecologies. The lecture maps the current and near-future media landscape and seeks to make the transformations now under way more visible and open to collective reflection.
Extended version of the abstract available here.
Venues
Berlin Technical University
Wednesdays 4 - 6 pm (every other week)
IMOs, Fasanenstr. 89, 10623 Berlin, IMoS, Room 0004
(entrance at Müller-Breslau-Straße 10)
and
Potsdam University, Golm Campus
Fridays 10 - 12 am (every other week)
Mathematics Institute, Building 9
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25
D-14476 Potsdam OT Golm