This talk explores how the artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. At every turn, we hear echoes, in the rhetoric of the artificial intelligentsia, of a eugenic calculus: the weak must be sacrificed for the strong to survive. They promise to guide us into the Future™, positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they help engineer the crises against which we must guard. But it is not enough to refute the legacies of eugenics animating the faux futures of the artificial intelligentsia; we must inaugurate legacies of solidarity that reflect our intrinsic interdependence as a people and a planet.
This is the first of two Tanner Lectures by Ruha Benjamin. For information on the second Tanner Lecture, click here.
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024) among other publications. Professor Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship.
Evelynn Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Interim Director of the Charles Warren Center (2024-25) at Harvard University. She was the first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University (2005-2008). From 2008 to 2013 she served as Dean of Harvard College. Following that she was Chair of the Department of History of Science (2017-2022). Professor Hammonds’ areas of research include the histories of science, medicine and public health in the United States; race, gender and sexuality in science studies; feminist theory and African American history.
In collaboration with the Office of the President of Harvard University, the Mahindra Humanities Center hosts annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The purpose of the Tanner Lectures is the advancement of scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values. That purpose embraces the entire range of moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and social – the full register of values pertinent to the human condition, interest, behavior, and aspiration.
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Utah. They are funded by an endowment and other gifts received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. More information: www.tannerlectures.utah.edu.
LOCATION:John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Music Building STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250409T200000Z DTEND:20250409T213000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR