Feeling Like a State: Affet and Control in the Age of AI
Speaker: Silvia Lindtner, University of Michigan
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Abstract: Many commentators fear that AI enables new levels of surveillance and thus a crisis for liberal democracy. I argue that an obsession with surveillance has clouded other forms of control that are more difficult to notice, operating through the production and circulation of affect. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in China, I challenge the idea that the authoritarian state is capable only of coercive control enabled by an all-seeing machinery of vision technology. And I show that America’s and China’s approaches to AI have much in common, with AI functioning as a useful "emotional technology" for political regime formation. This talk offers ways to rethink control and pursue avenues for resistance, bringing into conversation feminist sensibilities, research in rural China, and the use of AI in population management in China and America.
About our speaker: Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She is the author of the award-winning book Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of the multigraph Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020). She has spent almost 20 years conducting ethnographic research, predominantly in China but also in the United States, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Her research program advances the social and cultural study of technology. Lindtner has been a Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai (2021-2024), a Visiting Scholar with the Paul Tsai China Center at the Yale Law School (2024-25), a CUSP (China-US Scholars Program) Fellow (2021-22), and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program (2021-23). Lindtner’s research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IIE (the Institute of International Education), IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), and Intel Labs, among others.
Zoom registration here:https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/IWFi3NDRTnGWjG1qsmwaZg