Algorithmic reason in the global tech laboratory

How did algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligence become the inevitable answer to global challenges? A political rationality is rising across the world that situates emerging technology as key to social, political, and economic transformations. National security questions are increasingly approached through algorithmic realities while humanitarian action to govern precarious lives becomes entangled with big tech companies and start-ups. Yet these technologies also seem to amplify existing hierarchies and replicate social divisions, themselves products of historical and contemporary politics of exclusion, prompting us to ask: What visions of societal progress are imagined through emerging technology? What is the prospect for collective action and democratic imaginaries in a context of these new rationalities?

At this double book launch and talk, we will hear insights on the role of emerging technology in shaping current political and social thought, presenting, and discussing Algorithmic Reason (Aradau, Blanke) and The Global Lab (Fejerskov) (both Oxford University Press, 2022). By analysing wider socio-technical and political processes, these new works speak to a commonality: the rise of rationalities that embraces emerging technology as societal disruptors while at the same time reproducing inequalities and hierarchies in our societies.

NB! The double book launch takes place at Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s Apollo Bar.

Speakers
Claudia Aradau, professor, King’s College London
Tobias Blanke, professor, University of Amsterdam
Rebecca Adler-Nissen, professor, University of Copenhagen
Karen Kisakeni Sørensen, innovation lead, Red Cross
Sine Nørholm Just, professor, Roskilde University
Adam Moe Fejerskov, senior researcher, DIIS
Jethro Norman, postdoc, DIIS

Programme
14.00-14.05     Introduction, Jethro Norman
14.05-14.15     Algorithmic Reason, Claudia Aradau & Tobias Banke
14.15-14.25     The Global Lab: Inequality, technology, and the new experimental movement, Adam Fejerskov
14.25-15.00     Discussion - Algorithmic Reason in the Global Tech Laboratory, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Sine Just & Karen Kisakeni Sørensen
15.00-15.30     Reception

The double book launch was held on 13 October 2022, 14.00-15.30 at Kunsthal Charlottenborg's Apollo Bar.