As part of a panel moderated by Julia Maria Mönig, Goda Klumbytė gave a talk titled Diagrammatics of AI: Tracing and Diffracting Epistemologies of Machine Learning Algorithms; the conference was hosted by the Center for Science & THought at the University of Bonn in the frame of the DesirableAI project.

Conference description:

This two-day symposium takes Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski as a generative starting point for urgent feminist and antiracist conversations about technology in our current moment. Central to the book are the concepts of the surrogate human effect and technoliberalism, which together diagnose how liberal promises of freedom are sustained through conditions of structural unfreedom. While technology may not directly cause unfreedom, it automates, scales up and accelerates the reproduction of racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies through its entwinement with global capitalism, militarism, and empire. The symposium aims to probe how these insights might guide historical and contemporary approaches to the accelerating integration of AI, robotics, and algorithmic systems into a variety of geopolitical milieus.

Across the sessions, the symposium asks: What visions of technological futures are possible—or necessary—when viewed from the standpoint of feminist, decolonial, and antiracist critique? How does scholarly work today help us understand and contest the uneven distributions of power, agency, and vulnerability that characterize our technological present?

Gathering a diverse group of scholars whose work speaks to critical questions of racism, empire, labor and technology, the symposium invites participants to reflect on their own research through the lens of Surrogate Humanity. Panelists will reflect on the book’s framing concepts as a springboard to engage with pressing issues such as the rise of tech oligarchies, the consolidation of technofascist regimes, the emergence of a new AI Cold War, and grassroots organizing around the impacts of generative AI.