Intersectional Automations explores a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. As robots, machine learning applications, and human augmentics are artifacts of human culture, they sometimes carry stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege into their computational logics, platforms, and/or embodiments. The essays in this multidisciplinary collection consider how questions of equity and social justice impact our understanding of these developments, analyzing not only the artifacts themselves, but also the discourses and practices surrounding them, including societal understandings, design choices, law and policy approaches, and their uses and abuses.

In Christian Ethics and Biomedical Innovation, Stephen Goundrey-Smith outlines a strategy for future adoption of human enhancement technologies which will ensure that such technologies are a common good, a strategy which is appropriate for a pluralistic society, yet consistent with Christian ethical principles. Drawing on the history of biomedical innovation to date in pharmaceutical medicine, he argues that technological capability alone is not enough, and that the responsible adoption of enhancement technologies will require active ethical deliberation and robust public policy discourse. Goundrey-Smith argues that biomedical technology, ethics, and public policy together form an essential triad for appropriate future enhancement technology adoption. This approach helps to ensure that biomedical technologies introduced will be common goods, and to reduce the risk of their instrumental use. The use of any technology is closely linked to its sociopolitical and cultural context and, drawing on Augustine’s The City of God, Goundrey-Smith presents a theological vision for good biomedical technology innovation in human society.

In the context of sustained economic and environmental crises, marked by extreme inequalities of wealth, rising xenophobia, racism and precarity, never has the need for a radical change of system been so pressing. This book is an invitation to think the world otherwise. The author breathes new life into socialist thought through the deployment of an intersectional lens, bringing diverse struggles for emancipation both within and outside the Global North into dialogue with one another. In doing so, he offers the kind of bold and holistic thinking the present situation calls for.

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the twentieth century’s great but underappreciated Marxist and feminist thinkers. Her unique philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism—as well as her grasp of Hegelian dialectics and the deep humanism that informs Marx’s thought—has much to teach us today. From her account of state capitalism (part of her socio-economic critique of Stalinism, fascism, and the welfare state), to her writings on Rosa Luxemburg, Black and women’s liberation, and labor, we are offered indispensable resources for navigating the perils of sexism, racism, capitalism, and authoritarianism. This collection of essays, from a diverse group of writers, brings to life Dunayevskaya’s important contributions. Revisiting her rich legacy, the contributors to this volume engage with her resolute Marxist-Humanist focus and her penetrating dialectics of liberation that is connected to Black, labor, and women’s liberation and to struggles over alienation and exploitation the world over. Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism is recovered for the twenty-first century and turned, as it was with Dunayevskaya herself, to face the multiple alienations and de-humanizations of social life.

The concept of intersectionality has become a central topic in academic and activist circles alike. But what exactly does it mean, and why has it emerged as such a vital lens through which to explore how social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and ethnicity shape one another? In this fully revised and expanded second edition of their popular text, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge provide a much-needed introduction to the field of intersectional knowledge and praxis. Analyzing the emergence, growth, and contours of the concept of intersectionality, the authors also consider its global reach through an array of new topics such as the rise of far-right populism, reproductive justice, climate change, and digital environments and cultures. Accessibly written and drawing on a plethora of lively examples to illustrate its arguments, the book highlights intersectionality’s potential for understanding complex architecture of social and economic inequalities and bringing about social justice-oriented change. Intersectionality will be an invaluable resource for anyone grappling with the main ideas, debates, and new directions in this field. Also available as an audiobook.

This groundbreaking book explores the power of collaborative AI in amplifying human creativity and expertise. Written by two seasoned experts in data analytics, AI, and machine learning, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the creative process behind AI-powered content generation. It takes the reader through a unique collaborative process between human authors and various AI-based topic experts, created, prompted, and fine-tuned by the authors. This book features a comprehensive list of prompts that readers can use to create their own ChatGPT-powered topic experts. By following these expertly crafted prompts, individuals and businesses alike can harness the power of AI, tailoring it to their specific needs and fostering a fruitful collaboration between humans and machines. With real-world use cases and deep insights into the foundations of generative AI, the book showcases how humans and machines can work together to achieve better business outcomes and tackle complex challenges. Social and ethical implications of collaborative AI are covered and how it may impact the future of work and employment. Through reading the book, readers will gain a deep understanding of the latest advancements in AI and how they can shape our world. Converging Minds: The Creative Potential of Collaborative AI is essential reading for anyone interested in the transformative potential of AI-powered content generation and human-AI collaboration. It will appeal to data scientists, machine learning architects, prompt engineers, general computer scientists, and engineers in the fields of generative AI and deep learning. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution- No Derivatives (CC-BY -ND)] 4.0 license.

This book · includes contributions from a diverse, international range of scholars and practitioners and this volume examines the ways laboratories of all kinds contribute to digital research and pedagogy. · Acknowledging that they are emerging amid varied cultural and scientific traditions, the volume considers how they lead to the specification of digital humanities and how a locally situated knowledge production is embedded in the global infrastructure system. · consolidates the discussion on the role of the laboratory in DH and brings digital humanists into the interdisciplinary debate concerning the notion of a laboratory as a critical site in the generation of experimental knowledge. Positioning the discussion in relation to ongoing debates in DH, the volume argues that laboratory studies are in an excellent position to capitalize on the theories and knowledge developed in the DH field and open up new research inquiries. · clearly demonstrates that the laboratory is a key site for theoretical and political analyses of digital humanities and will thus be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners engaged in the study of DH, culture, media, heritage and infrastructure.

This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

Technical automation – the ability of man-made (or god-made) objects to move and act autonomously – is not just the province of engineering or science fiction. In this book, Maria Gerolemou, by taking as her starting point the close semantic and linguistic relevance of technical automation to natural automatism, demonstrates how ancient literature, performance and engineering were often concerned with the way nature and artifice interacted. Moving across epic, didactic, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and ancient science, this is a brilliant assembly of evidence for the power of 'automatic theatre' in ancient literature. Gerolemou starts with the earliest Greek literature of Homer and Hesiod, where Hephaestus' self-moving artefacts in the Iliad reflect natural forces of motion and the manufactured Pandora becomes an autonomous woman. Her second chapter looks at Greek drama, where technical automation is used to augment and undermine nature not only through staging and costume but also in plot devices where statues come to life and humans behave as automatic devices. In the third chapter, Gerolemou considers how the philosophers of the 4th century BCE and the engineers of the Hellenistic period with their mechanical devices contributed to a growing dialogue around technical automation and how it could help its audience glance and marvel at the hidden mechanisms of self-motion. Finally, the book explores the ways technical automation is employed as an ekphrastic technique in late antiquity and early Byzantium.

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.