Autonomy and Automation: Robotics, AI and the Digital Cultural Future

A One Day Seminar at DCRC - UWE Bristol

Saturday March 8, 2014

Through a curiously ambivalent wave of media attention robotics and AI have emerged as major
topics for media and cultural research to address in a more substantial fashion. The oscillation
between accounts of drones and surveillance applications on the one hand and promises of
beneficial medical and social uses of helpful robots and intelligent systems on the other is
symptomatic of increasing uncertainty about what philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the
pharmacological (both poison and cure, necessary but hazardous therapeutic supplement)
character of technoscience and the technocultural transformation it hastens onward.

This one day seminar seeks to contribute toward the placing of robotics and AI firmly on the
critical agenda via an interdisciplinary approach bringing humanities, science and science and
technology studies into dialogue. In doing so it will respond to questions around autonomy and
automation that robotics and AI developments are posing today in social, cultural, political and
military registers. If these questions are not entirely new, the rapid advances in these fields of
technoscientific endeavour make it increasingly urgent to repose them, not least because what
seems to be looming on the horizon is the disappearance of the critical autonomy to interrogate
and to reshape the cultural and political adoption of such advances.

Keynote speakers will be Lucy Suchman of Lancaster Universitys Sociology Department,
member of Lancasters Centres for Science Studies and for Gender and Womens Studies and
member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and Joanna Bryson of Bath
Universitys Computer Science Department, leader of its Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence
research sub-group and co-author of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics (http://bit.ly/1czCs86).

Submissions for Papers/presentations dealing with one of the following areas are invited:

Creative, artistic or activist uses, reflections or interventions related to AI and robotics
developments;
Ethical, juridicial and political issues related to the use of automatic decision-making
systems autonomously or in combinations with human decision-makers;
Media debates and discourses concerning AI and robotics developments;
Emerging developments in robotics and AI and their cultural, social and political
implications.

Abstracts of 200 words for a presentation of 20 min.maximum. due by 3 February, 2014. Email
abstracts to patrick.crogan@uwe.ac.uk. Notification of acceptance by 14 February, 2014.
Accepted presenters can apply for domestic UK travel costs.

We encourage all submitters to attend and participate as we hope to develop the Seminar
activities further through subsequent exchanges and collaborations. The event is free, but
registration is required go to http://bit.ly/airobotics

Venue: Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol BS1 5TX
Date: Saturday March 8, 2014.
Time: 10 am 6.00 pm

Refreshments will be provided

Contact dcrcevents@uwe.ac.uk for further information.or visit dcrc.org.uk