Networked bodies, AI, and our future digital lives

Isabel Pedersen’s Big Thinking Lecture Networked bodies, AI, and our future digital lives was originally broadcast on April 28, 2020 for the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada series.

Will bodies become computer platforms? Disruptive embodied computing technology is being proposed, and it will change how people live in vastly different ways in our evolving post-Internet society. The idea of a thoroughly quantified, remotely monitored networked body is propelling discussions of personal privacy, human agency, creativity, consent, social connection, cultural values, and ethics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seeping into all computing paradigms. As a consequence, AI also operates as an ideology, a belief system.

This talk raises questions about early-phase embodied technologies and the unintended consequences that may result in the future. Dr. Isabel Pedersen is Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture and Associate Professor at Ontario Tech University.

Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis are co-editors of Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, a collection released in spring 2020 by MIT Press. As a humanities researcher, Pedersen explores how technology is invented and adopted; she takes a human-centric approach to understand the impact on life, culture, politics, art, ethics and social practices. She was inducted into The Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars,
Artists and Scientists in 2014.

References

Pedersen, I. (2020, April 28). Big Thinking with Isabel Pedersen: Networked bodies, AI, and our future digital lives. Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Federation HSS).

Pedersen, I., & Iliadis, A. (Eds.). (2020). Embodied computing: Wearables, implantables,
embeddables, ingestibles. The MIT Press.