No such thing as society? Learning from AI in the street.

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• Professor Noortje Marres, Professor in Science, Technology and Society in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick
• Tuesday 11 March 2025, 12:30-14:00
• Sociology Department Seminar Room, Free School Lane.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact communications.

All welcome.

The street provides ample opportunity for the social study of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here we can observe different modes of existence of AI - in the form of apps, automated vehicles and smart infrastructure – in situ and we can examine how these manifest, intersect, and transform collective life in a type of multifarious environment that is characteristic of contemporary society: the street is part public/part private space, both communal place and utility infrastructure.

However, in attempting to facilitate situated encounters between everyday publics and AI in this setting, the AI in the street project found that AI is defined more by its absence than by presence in the street. Along commuter roads, at difficult crossings, and in the urban thoroughfares where we conducted our participatory research, the project found that AI mostly operates outside the zones of human-non-human interaction that define social life in these settings. In the street AI manifests indirectly, through proxies (smart traffic lights, sensors in lampposts, digital billboards), and the technicities that enable its functioning remain mostly inaccessible to the senses. In other words, AI - unlike other digital technologies such as platforms -lacks a social interface in the street.

In this presentation, Prof Marres will reflect on these findings, and propose that some of the most significant impacts of AI on the world derive from the ways in which the digital economy’s attempted approximation between technicity and sociality is becoming undone in an age defined by investment in AI.

This talk is part of the Dept of Sociology series.

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• Dept of Sociology
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