Addressing the ways in which religion, spirituality, and belief influence the roles that AI plays in our lives, the panel will provide unique insights into the diverse facets of AI's impact on our present and future societies.
Participants
Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia. Thao has published on topics including the aesthetics of digital voice assistants, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. She is the co-editor of the volumes An Anthropogenic Table of Elements (University of Toronto Press) and Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of 'Ethics' in AI (Institute of Network Cultures), and her writing appears in journals such as Big Data & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technosocience, Science as Culture, and Cultural Studies.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor of Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design. She was a 2021 visiting Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College. There, she co-curated the exhibition Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI with Meldia Yesayan at Oxy Arts, which travelled to the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York in September 2023 under the title What Models Make Worlds. She is the guest editor of the spring 2023 issue of Art Papers on artificial intelligence. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists’ Books in 2022. Her writing and commentary have appeared in AI & Society, Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Journal, Archetypes with Meghan Markle, and Art in America.
Beth Singler is the Assistant Professor in Digital Religion(s) and co-lead of the Media Existential Encounters and Evolving Technology Lab at the University of Zurich. As an anthropologist, her research focuses on the human, and considers the social, ethical, and religious implications in developments in AI and robotics. Beth has spoken about her research at the Hay Festival as one of the Hay 30 to watch, as well as at New Scientist Live, Ars Electronica, the Edinburgh Science Festival, the Cheltenham Science Festival, the Science Museum, the Barbican, and has appeared several times on BBC Click and BBC Click Live. She has appeared on BBC Radio's Start the Week, the Today Programme, Beyond Belief, Free Thinking, and the Sunday Programme, and presented an essay on BBC Radio 3 for the Year of Blade Runner. More recently, she has co-edited a Cambridge Companion to Religion and AI with Fraser Watts and is also writing a new book on Religion and AI.
