Co-Opting AI: Antiquity

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia invite you to a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI.” This will be a completely virtual event.

This event will explore how past narratives and practices shape how we think about automation, intelligent machines, gods and robots, and language in the age of AI.

Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne is the John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of Classics and a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee to the Democracy Initiative at the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 2016. Her scholarship centers on the educational practices and intellectual culture of ancient Greece and how institutions of schooling in antiquity shaped the legacy of Classical Greece to the present. She has published several articles on Greek literature and cultural history in Classical Philology and Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, and recently co-edited a volume on “Documentality: New Approaches to Written Documents in Imperial Life and Literature” (2022) with colleagues Scott DiGiulio and Inger Kuin. Her current book in progress, “An Education in Fiction,” argues that literate education in antiquity rigorously trained students to discern fact from fiction in written and oral narratives. This research has been awarded a 2023 NEH Summer Stipend. Arthur-Montagne looks forward to collaborating with fellow members of the Karsh Institute of Democracy and partners to explore the relationships between democracy, education, and the humanities in societies past and present.

Kevin Donnelly is an associate professor of history and teaches a wide range of courses in European and World History at both the survey and seminar level, including courses such as the History of Happiness, The European Century, History of Science, 20th Century World History and World War One: 100 Years Later. His research interests are in the history of science and intellectual history, broadly conceived, with a general interest in modern European ideas, including notions of progress, technology, and the sciences of man. He has published a number of articles and book chapters, and delivered talks on a variety of topics, including the nineteenth-century polymath Adolphe Quetelet, the early history of climate change, boredom in science, the 1832 Parisian cholera outbreak, the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth, and the cult television show Mystery Science Theater 3000. In 2016 the University of Pittsburg Press published Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874.

Elly R. Truitt is an associate professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the circulation of scientific objects and natural knowledge throughout central and western Eurasia and north Africa, from antiquity into the early modern period. Truitt has a particular interest in how scientific ideas, practices, and objects traveled and were adapted to new settings, and philosophical treatises, archival material, literary texts, lyric, material objects, and images all inform my work. Her first book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Penn, 2015), explored the history of automata in medieval Latin culture, where they appeared as gifts from foreign rulers in Baghdad and Damascus and at the courts of Constantinople and Shengdu, and demonstrated that artificial people and animals were ubiquitous in medieval culture, and that they were used to pose questions about identity, liveliness, and the ethics of knowledge and creation. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Harvard University/Villa I Tatti, and other institutions. Truitt has also published articles on the history of automata, the history of timekeeping technology, Roger Bacon and courtly science, pharmacobotany, and on concepts of artificial intelligence in the Middle Ages.

Mona Sloane is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). As a sociologist, she studies the intersection of technology and society, specifically in the context of AI design, use, and policy. She also convenes the Co-Opting AI series and serves as the editor of the Co-Opting AI book series at the University of California Press as well as the Technology Editor for Public Books. At UVA, Mona runs Sloane Lab which conducts empirical research on the implications of technology for the organization of social life. Its focus lies on AI as a social phenomenon that intersects with wider cultural, economic, material, and political conditions. The lab spearheads social science leadership in applied work on responsible AI, public scholarship, and technology policy. More here: monasloane.org.

The Co-Opting AI event series is convened by Mona Sloane. It is hosted by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, and Sloane Lab.