"ARE YOU AFRAID OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?"

Please, feel free to take this survey and share it freely. This is an opportunity to explain your vision and perception of contemporary technologies, and to have access to the total results, in order to understand more how people feel about AI. The questionnaire takes about 8 to 10 minutes; it is anonymous, and is part of a wider project we are conducting to understand how we, humans of the 21st century, feel about technology, big data, human enhancements, ecology and self-realization.

Please, note that there are not right or wrong answer; for each question, you can select as many answers as you wish. The results of the survey may be later shared in publications and presentations addressing the human condition in the 21st century.

Some of the answers may be quoted directly; no private information will be shared in any form. The results of this survey are released under a Creative Commons License, By Attribution and Non-Commercial (CC BY NC); they are openly available to anyone taking the survey.

Prof. Aleksandra Lukaszewicz Alcaraz and Dr. Pawel Fortuna invite you to participate in the international scientific research aiming at learning how people on various continents perceive figures present in our social life, especially in the field of art.

They present six figures, out of which not all are human. Then, we will ask to evaluate them in reference to different features of character. They will give instruction, which will facilitate achieving reliable analysis.

The survey should take around 25 minutes. Please treat this time as a moment of relax, a moment for yourself.

On the basis of this they presented on the conference "Crossing the Border of Humanity: Cyborgs in Ethics, Law, and Art" (https://cyborgsconference.com) the paper: "Turing Test 2.0: Attribution of Moral Status and Personhood to Humans, Animals, Cyborgs, Social Robots, and Algorithms".

Interesting conference proceedings (containing our contribution), edited by Monika Michalowska with support of Steve Fuller and Steve Mann are to be found HERE and HERE

Prof. Aleksandra Lukaszewicz Alcaraz and Dr. Pawel Fortuna on the basis of their research are publishing in the Postdigital Science and Education Journal the text "Turing Test 2.0 - Attribution of Moral Status and Personhood to Humans, Animals, Cyborgs, Social Robots, and Algorithms".

The survey is to be found at this LINK

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston are co-sponsoring a speaker series on the future of work.

Our first speaker is Kevin LaGrandeur

Abstract: My argument will be that our development of intelligent technology over the years has combined mimesis with a Hegelian dialectic to create an ironic, and possibly dangerous, mimetic cycle in today’s posthuman world. As a species, we have moved from creating intelligent tools in our own functional image to having those tools execute human functions so well that they are forcing us to remake ourselves in their machinic image. In other words, we are in a situation where in order to survive competition from our own intelligent inventions we must incorporate into ourselves elements of those very inventions, or risk losing jobs--and perhaps even existential viability.

Dr. Kevin LaGrandeur is Professor Emeritus at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, and co-founder of the NY Posthuman Research Group. He specializes in technology and culture, ethics, and education. Dr. LaGrandeur is a member of the founding editorial boards of two journals: AI and Ethics, and the Journal of Posthumanism. As well, he is on the founding editorial board of the book series Critical Posthuman and Citizenship Studies, by the publisher Rowman and Littlefield. He has published more than 50 articles and media productions, in both professional venues and the popular press, and 2 books: Artificial Slaves (2013), which won a 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Prize, and Surviving the Machine Age (2017), with sociologist James Hughes.

On February 3-5, 2022, The University of Waswaw kindly invite you to join for the “Re-Thinking Agency: Non-Anthropocentric Approaches” conference, organized by our Research Team as part of the “Excellence Initiative – Research University” Programme at the University of Warsaw.

The event opens a series of symposiums “Discourses of the (Post)Anthropocene”carried out in cooperation with the strategic partners of our project: the University of California, Los Angeles, and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

Over 100 researchers from all over the world have confirmed their participation in the conference: from Europe, through North and South America, Africa, Asia, to Australia and Oceania.

The opening keynote lecture entitled “What Flashes Up: Errant Wanderings / Wonderings: The Materiality of Imagining, the Imaginings of Materiality” will be given by prof. Karen Barad from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

For further info, click HERE

Mount Saint Vincent University (Canada) organizes the event "Indigenous Futurism and Horror".

All the info can be found on the attached poster.

The Department for the Study of Religions in Masaryk University, Brno and RASWE, the Research Association for the Study of Western Esotericism are pleased to invite you to the international online conference, Deus Ex Machina. The themes will explore esotericism and mysticism in connection to technological implementation. We are looking forwards to seeing you online.

Modern technological development has allowed for the emergence of an unprecedented variety of revolutionary channels. These have vehicled the diffusion of traditional and new religious movements. The internet, has wired itself into our lives to the point of being almost indispensable. It offers previously unprecedented ways to reach ancient grimoires, as well as contemporary literature on magic and religions at the click of a mouse. However, with the acceleration of the internet age the convergence between religion, spirituality and technology has reached its own entanglement. Sacred spaces, rituals and magical practices are slowly adapting to cyberspace. In the virtual environment we can become priests, heroes, or even gods. Cyberculture has played a significant role in the creation of highly imaginative realities. It amalgamated the fictional with traditional magical knowledge and practice as in the cases of Ubik by Philip Dick. Gaming worlds are becoming more complex, even adapting to the behavior of the player. The experience offered is almost life-like. Is the virtual reality just a harmless entertainment phenomenon, or could it be a parallel to an astral realm travel, influencing the subsequent feelings, opinions, and behavior of the traveler? What about the objectives of transcendence in transhumanism?

For further info, click HERE

Given the pivotal disruptive role being played by AI in extending and augmenting the capabilities of citizens and other stakeholders of the digital ecosystem, it appears crucial to understand and analyze the myriad range of legal dimensions that the usage of AI can give rise to. This conference seeks to provide an opportunity to all the participants to understand various aspects of AI and its uses in conjunction with digital technologies, and to exchange with domain experts various ideas and solutions to existing and potential problems plaguing the industry and the economy. It will also act as a platform for scholars, academicians, professionals, and students from across the globe to come together and discuss the challenges posed by AI to existing legal domains and efficacious regulatory possibilities in the digital domain. In course of this exercise, the participants will also gain insight into the concepts involved from the perspectives of multiple jurisdictions.

Those who are interested in presenting a paper on any of the above themes must send an abstract of 400 words along with a brief biographical note (not more than 100 words) on or before 20 January 2022 at (isaidt.info@gmail.com). The authors of the abstracts selected for presentation will be informed by 29th January 2022. A full-length paper of 4,000 – 6,000 words must be sent by 12th February 2022. Submission of the full paper would be presumed as unconditional consent of the author/s for a possible publication by the organizers.

Last date for submission of abstracts:  20th January 2022

Last date for notification of acceptance of abstracts: 29th January 2022

Last date for submission of full paper (minimum 4000 words):  12th February 2022

Conference date: 26th February 2022

For further info, click HERE

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material).

Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine ”I”, who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning “I”'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject.

For further info on the book, click HERE

Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Cary Wolfe explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe. He shows how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings helps develop more potent ethical and political commitments.

Conversational in style yet highly ambitious in its ideas, this inspiring collection explores different ways of being in the world for humans and nonhumans alike. Cary Wolfe provides a unique approach to thinking both about art and with art—but also a new possibility for seeing and sensing the world through art.

(Joanna Zylinska, King’s College London)

For further info on the book, click HERE

'Art after Nature', the book series co-edit by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard for University of Minnesota Press, can be officially launched with the publication of our first book: Cary Wolfe's 'Art and Posthumanism'.

At a time of unprecedented ecological crisis and cultural change, Art after Nature explores the epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities. Authors featured in this series engage with the recent ontological turn, upending anthropocentrism, in order to grapple with the dark ecological fluidity of naturecultures. The anthropogenic lenses of inquiry emphasize an ethical focus, foregrounding the more-than-human politics of our era. Within this framework, art theory, practice, and criticism are reconfigured as intersecting platforms upon which current philosophical trajectories can be mapped. This series engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene in order to problematize recent and influential disciplines such as animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism, through art writing and art making. Books published in Art after Nature foster true multidisciplinarity, accessibility, and diversity. Each volume aims to provide readers with the opportunity to creatively engage with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy.

For further info, click HERE

For further info, click HERE

The theme of the 2022 annual conference is Animal Nature. This theme directs our focus to the diverse ways in which animals, nature and naturalness are connected and entangled culturally and societally. And in specific to the ways in which these connections are both produced and challenged in everyday practices and discourses, or as part of cultural and societal institutions such as art or politics.

The concept of nature has been utilized but also deconstructed and reconstructed repeatedly in human and social sciences. What do we then talk about when we talk about nature or naturalness? What are the meanings attached to the concepts of nature and natural in different contexts such as environmental conservation, the keeping of livestock or companion animals, or at the level of the animal industrial complex? What are the forms of power embedded in defining what is natural? The biodiversity is declining, and the habitats of wildlife are changing due to environmental crises. What do then nature or naturecultures mean as living environments of animals? And how could we take into account animal agency in considering questions of nature and naturalness?


Dates: April 4th–6th, 2022
Location: University of Turku, Finland, and online
Languages: Finnish and English
Participation fee: € 25, Students 15 € (Members of YKES or TYKE € 0)
Organizers: The Finnish Society for Human-Animal Studies (YKES) and Turku Human-Animal Studies Network (TYKE).

For further info, click HERE

The editors welcome empirical studies and grounded approaches that deploy digital methods and explore digital expressions of religion. We also invite contributions that consider religion more expansively, and consider phenomena and practices that are not conventionally religious in nature and scope but operate within and produce similar paradigms. Contributions which focus on the production and circulations of ethics, morality, digital religious performances and aesthetics will also be considered. We envision creative theoretical and conceptual contributions that chart, characterize and contextualize the digital turn in the study of religion and its implications for the aforementioned post-colonial contexts.

Abstract submission deadline: 28 Feb 2022

For further info, click HERE

For Bioneers’ 33rd conference we are excited for art to play a vital, celebratory and transformational role at the conference!

Our mission is to program the 2022 conference with captivating, compelling and inspiring art and we invite you to help us make this vision a reality. For the first time in many years, the conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, May 13-15th, 2022.

What is Bioneers?

The Annual Bioneers Conference is where you get a front row seat into a thriving and regenerative tomorrow, today. The conference is an engaging and inspiring environment of collaboration, with individuals of all sectors and disciplines, engaged in co-creating a regenerative  future. The Bioneers conference is  where social, environmental and scientific innovators convene to present breakthrough solutions inspired by nature and powered by human ingenuity.

The Bioneers Conference fosters connection, cross-pollination and collaboration by bringing together diverse people and projects. We link strategic networks at the local, regional, national and international levels.

Bioneers conference attendance is 2,000+ with an engaged social media audience of 220,000+, and with a year-round engagement via its media and radio series production.

For further info, click HERE

If you are interested in joining the community, and / or volunteering, and/ or forming regional posthuman networks in your area, please email us at: NYposthuman[at]gmail.com

Thanks for connecting and sharing your insights and visions!

Peace, Health and Much Appreciation,
The Global Posthuman Network
www.posthumans.org