Decimal Lab (UOIT) in partnership with the Digital Life Research Group (UOIT) welcomes the public to an evening of short academic talks on current technocultural issues to launch the Decimal Speakers Series. With a mandate to mobilize knowledge and engage the community in questions concerning digital life, the Speakers Series will feature both invited guests as well as internal research associates.
Date: March 1, 2018
Time: 5:30-7:30PM
Place: Toronto, Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Ave 4th floor
Rsvp: Free and open to the Public, rsvp decimal.lab.uoit@gmail.com
Moderator: Andrea Slane, PhD
Featured Speakers
Gary Genosko, PhD
Leap Smears: Corporate Ontology and Time Criticality
Since 1972 compensatory leap seconds have been introduced 37 times due to the discrepancy between Coordinated Universal Time and International Atomic Time. Google uses a temporal smear over the course of 20 hours, within the machine worlds of its NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers. Google wants other corporations to follow its Kairotic time critical practice. A corporate ontology of control would rewire the history of Western metaphysics and constitute a convulsive Aionic event.
Isabel Pedersen, PhD
‘Keeping up’: Humans, Brain-computer Interaction and AI Futures
In 2016, Elon Musk said “not all AI futures are benign”. His answer to this conundrum was to launch OpenAI, a non-profit venture at the same time as Neuralink Corp, his brain computer implant company. One Rolling Stone article explains Musk’s intent: “Neuralink allows our brains to keep up in the intelligence race.” This talk addresses the theme of vulnerability as a technocultural motivator. Brain-computer technology is developed in both consumer and research spheres to read thoughts, feelings, reactions, anxieties, delights, and fears. Ethical questions arise from the interpretation and storage of emotions within data assemblages and the implied future of their role in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Tanner Mirrlees, PhD
Ubiquitous Media War: A New Paradigm?
This presentation conceptualizes the conditions and characteristics of the “ubiquitous media war.” The military history of the Internet is well known, and currently, the institutions of war and the businesses of Web 2.0 converge as result of military-corporate research and development (R&D) partnerships, military-Silicon Valley procurement regimes, information operations, and techno-cultural imaginings. As militaries drive the digital to war, media wars in an age of abundant, interactive, and many-to-many social media platforms are qualitatively different from and disruptive to the media wars waged in the TV broadcasting age of media scarcity, transmission communication models, and few-to-many content flows.