What does it mean to be Human in Dataspace?
Join us this Autumn/ Fall and into the New Year for an intriguing 3-part series titled ”What does it mean to be Human in Dataspace?” In the first event we will explore the nature of our embodied memories, in the second, our emerging relationship with AI and in the third pull a number of themes together as we discern how the boundaries between our biological selves and both our own digital selves and AI, become blurrier and blurrier.
To help us along the way, we are diving into literature and film to provide prompts for our exploring.
This series promises to be a thought-provoking discussion that will challenge our understanding of human interaction in the rapidly changing AI landscape. Do join as we all broaden our horizons and enjoy great conversations with the wonderful Exponential Do community.
Come to one or all, the discussions will build upon each other. The sessions are highly interactive — we will ask participants to shape the session through individual contribution. Recordings will be available.
Wednesday, November 8 @ 6pm BST – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time–Swann's Way (1914) Download the PDF
This is the famous passage in Swann’s Way, the first Volume in Remembrance of Things Past. If you have the book to hand then dip in, there are so many phenomenological treasures - it opens with a brilliant description of sleeping and dreaming and waking, “I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some one will come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help…”
Wednesday, January 10 @ 6pm BST – After Yang
Kogonada, After Yang (2022) Watch the film
The director, Kogonada, invites us into his beautifully drawn out, cinematically unique, humbly futuristic A.I. drama to look at the questions - Why do we always imagine that an artificial being would want to be human? What does it mean to be and NOT be human? On a larger scale, what is existence itself?
Wednesday, February 21 @ 6pm BST – Being Human in Dataspace
After enjoying the literature of Proust and the beautiful imagery Kogonada shares, we will reflect together on the nature of human agency and imagine what it means to BE in dataspace.