The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) launches Machines & Meanings (M&M) — a cross-campus forum exploring how technologies transform knowledge, justice, and human possibility.
Generative AI and other emerging digital technologies have become ubiquitous with astonishing speed, promising to reshape how we learn, decide, and relate to one another. Yet these tools belong to a much longer story — of automation, cybernetics, and global information infrastructures — that continue to transform how humans imagine knowledge, justice, and possibility. At ICGC, we believe that understanding these technologies begins with understanding the world — its histories, inequalities, and moral imaginations.
Future sessions in the M&M forum will trace the longer histories of cybernetics, feedback systems, and global information infrastructures that shape today’s generative-AI moment.
M&M brings together researchers, artists, and practitioners to ask not only what machines can do, but what they are doing to us — to our methods, creativity, and sense of being human.
Events
Inaugural forum:
"Method in the Machine: Rethinking How We Study the Digital"
Speaker: Janaki Srinivasan (Associate Professor of Digital South Asian Studies, the University of Oxford)
October 21