Public Lecture: “Neural ‘Freedoms’: Population, Choice, and Machine Learning”

Join Duke’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory (CISSCT) for Orit Halpern’s upcoming talk, Neural ‘Freedoms’: Population, Choice, and Machine Learning. The event will take place in the East Duke Pink Parlor on Friday, March 31st from 3:30-5:00 pm.

This talk interrogates the history of models of decision making and agency in machine learning, neo-liberal economic thought, and finance in order to interrogate how reactionary politics, population, and technology are being reformulated in our present. While the relationship between the Right, post-truth, suggestion algorithms, and social media has long been documented, rarely has there been extensive investigation of how ideas of choice and freedom become recast in a manner amenable to machine automation and to particular brands of post-1970s alt-Right discourses. An analysis of this history demonstrates a new logic within algorithmic and artificial intelligent rationalities that intersects with, but is also not merely a repetition of, earlier histories of eugenics, sexism, and racism. This situation provokes serious challenges to political action, but also to our theorization of histories of race and sex capitalism.