Senior Research Seminar with Professor Morten Pedersen (Copenhagen University)

Senior Research Seminar with Professor Morten Pedersen (Copenhagen University)Anthropology after AI (and vice versa)

 

Drawing on more than a decade of experience from the interdisciplinary space between anthropology, data science, and tech governance, this talk explores the relationship between anthropology and artificial intelligence. I first discuss how ethnography and other qualitative data and methods can be combined with machine learning, and how this unsettles established divisions between qualitative and quantitative methods, epistemologies, and ethics. I then turn to much broader questions of how  - and whether –large language models (LLMs) and other forms of generative artificial intelligence are upending not just capitalism, labor and work, but also agency, intelligence and perhaps even humanity. Finally, I explore how anthropology, as both a scientific discipline and a professional practice, may not only itself be disrupted by AI, but what role anthropology  might have in future developments and applications of AI within the academy and beyond.

 

Bio:

Morten Axel Pedersen Professor of Anthropology and Social Data Science, Chief Scientist at the National Center for AI in Society, and Chair of UCPH AI, at Copenhagen University.