The Center for the Humanities was delighted to welcome Professor of Sociology Karla Erickson as its inaugural Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellow. Erickson filled the position for the 2020–21 academic year, during which time she pursued research on human-machine relations, taught a short course on her research, and delivered a public talk on her work.
Erickson’s current research project is called Messy Humans. As a center fellow, Erickson focused on “interactional robots,†exploring how our relationships with increasingly interactive machines affect our expectations for human-human relationships. Her interdisciplinary, center-sponsored short course, I/Robot, which she taught in the spring of 2021, was built around this same question.
Course Description
Professor Erickson’s course description provides an excellent sense of the pressing and provocative questions she helped students explore. How will/have our relationships to machines changed our relationships to other humans? Students in I/Robot, an interdisciplinary course sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, will explore this question by learning about early androids and artificial intelligence, studying representations of machines, exploring human-machine relationships, and choosing one device/machine to study.
Readings included excerpts from Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford, Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin, Talk to Me by James Vlahos, In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff, and research by Erickson and 51²è¹İapp alumni.
Public Talk
I/Robot: The Social Life of Machines
Professor Erickson brought a similar set of questions to her Humanities Center fellow public talk in the spring of 2021, "I/Robot: The Social Life of Machines." The description:
From navigational tools to self-trackers and from recommendation algorithms to roombas, more of our interactions are with autonomous machines or mediated by them. Due to the confluence of advanced machine learning; smaller, faster, and cheaper processing capacity; availability of massive data sets on which machines can train; and aggressive investment of financial and human resources, AI and robotic technology are leaping forward monthly, ushering in what many call a second machine age. In this talk, 2020–21 Humanities Center fellow Karla Erickson walks listeners into how we arrived here and some of the social implications of living at the “slash†between machines and humans. What will be the labor implications of ever-more-skilled devices? What do our devices, and our relationship to them, tell us about human wants, needs, and shortcomings?