International Scientific Symposium 2023,Body and Society: Consumerism, AI and Social Consequences, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Materiality of the Body’
Date: 5-6 June 2023
Location: University of Zadar, Croatia
I was invited by Department of Sociology, University of Zadar and Croatian Sociological Association.
Artificial Intelligence and the Materiality of the Body
Computer programmes with artificial intelligence today are becoming ubiquitous and are beginning to form not only various practices of everyday life, but also our ways of creative thinking. The increasing concern with risks of the expanding digital computational technologies become more salient ever, since the advent of ChatGPT, a natural language processing artificial intelligence. Some of the fears of ChatGPT concern replacements of human labour which could lead to expanding social inequality and loss of the ability to self-govern and sovereignty. Consequently, humans could become reliant on artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the key component of advanced artificial intelligence is the massive size of the trained data derived from the personal information in the Internet. Such aggregation of individual data could indicate the shift from the notion of the body as a physical entity to the body as data.
Scrutinizing the idea of ‘the body as data’ and emphasizing the significance of the body’s materiality, the paper discusses the the risks and limitations of artificial intelligence.
Focusing on the notions of embodiment, the paper seeks to shed light on medicine, robotics, and computer art, since all these areas are highly relevant to the juxtaposition of the human body and artificial systems. The paper argues that problems of AI Chabot medical services can be the limitations of standardized medical data applied to each single human body; explaining the importance of ‘having a body’ (embodiment) in biological inspired robots; and exploring a drawing machine project, to consider the challenge of transferring embodied knowledge (artistic skills and creativity) to a physical platform – a robot. By so doing, the paper attempts to avoid both biological positivism and neurodeterminism in order to explore the impact of AI in social life.
