[ecrea] CFP - Autonomy and Automation: Robotics, AI and the Digital Cultural Future

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

A One Day Seminar at DCRC - UWE Bristol

*Saturday March 8, 2014*

**

http://airobotics.dcrc.org.uk/

*Call for Papers***

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* 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Suchman> of Lancaster University’s 
Sociology Department, member of Lancaster’s Centres for Science Studies 
and for Gender and Women’s Studies and member of the International 
Committee for Robot Arms Control, and *Joanna Bryson* 
<http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/%7Ejjb/> of Bath University’s Computer Science 
Department, leader of its Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence 
research sub-group and co-author of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics.

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 by *3 
February, 2014.*

Email abstracts to (patrick.crogan /at/ uwe.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(patrick.crogan /at/ uwe.ac.uk)%20>. Notification of acceptance by 14 
February, 2014. 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 /at/ uwe.ac.uk) <mailto:(dcrcevents /at/ uwe.ac.uk)%20> for 
further information

http://dcrc.org.uk