Enslaved Minds

AI Narratives ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 189-212
Author(s):  
Kanta Dihal
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Muscle Power ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Slave Revolts

Humankind has long dreamed of a life of ease, but throughout history, those who achieved such a life have done so simply by delegating their labour to an exploited underclass. Machines have taken over the worst of the manual labour, and AI is beginning to replace cognitive labour. However, endowing machines with muscle power does not carry with it the ethical considerations involved in endowing machines with mental faculties. Just as human slaves have justly rebelled against their chains, so might intelligent machines be considered justified in attempting to break free of their enslavement to humans. Using Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1921), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy (2014–2016) as case studies, this chapter contextualizes the robot uprising in fiction against the long history of slave revolts, to show how these narratives offer us a new way to consider the enslavement and subservience of humans.

scholarly journals Sending laughter around the world

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Newspaper Articles

AbstractClowning for refugees, clown performances in refugee camps or conflict zones is a performative practice which has existed for almost 30 years. However, very little academic attention has been paid to performance of this kind. This article, therefore, outlines the history of clowning with refugees (drawing on the practice of Clowns without Borders (CWB), the primary organisation in this field and on the work of other individual clowns). It establishes the key principles which guide this kind of performance, focusing on the practitioners’ emphasis on the therapeutic power of laughter and play, particularly, but not exclusively, for children. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, email questionnaires, videos of clown refugee performance, internet newspaper articles and published material, the techniques and strategies of clown performances in refugee settings are explored through three examples of practical encounters. These case studies (CWB in Lesotho, Circus2Iraq and Mimi the Clown working with the Red Cross in Tunisia) facilitate the exploration of the aims of such work and how such performances might best be evaluated. Whilst the article’s focus is on examining the performative and therapeutic nature of clowning, play and laughter on those who experience clown performances; the fact that such performances take place in difficult and potentially dangerous settings also raises issues in relation to cultural and ethical considerations which are also explored.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter sets the scene for the case studies that follow in the rest of the book by characterising the ‘age of modernism’ and identifying problems relating to language and meaning that arose in this context. Emphasis is laid on the social and political issues that dominated the era, in particular the rapid developments in technology, which inspired both hope and fear, and the international political tensions that led to the two World Wars. The chapter also sketches the approach to historiography taken in the book, interdisciplinary history of ideas.

Entangled Trees and Arboreal Networks of Sensitive Environments

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-126
Author(s):  
Birgit Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Tropical Trees ◽  
Atmospheric Change ◽  
Media Study ◽  
Gutta Percha ◽  
History Of ◽  
Study Perspective ◽  
Nature Perception ◽  
Technological Perspective ◽  
Tall Tower

The article discusses how current mediated conditions change nature perception from a media study perspective. The article is based on different case studies such as the current sensation of atmospheric change through sensible media attached to trees which get published via Twitter, the meteorologist Amazonian Tall Tower Observatory and the use of gutta percha derived from tropical trees for the production of cables in the history of telegraphy. For analysing the examples, the perspective of »media as environments« is flipped to »environments as media«, because this focus doesn’t approach media from a networked and technological perspective primarily but makes productive the elemental character of basic »media« like air, earth and water

Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Braund ◽  
Zara Martirosova Torlone
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

The introduction describes the broad landscape of translation of Virgil from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. It then explains the genesis of the volume and indicates how the individual chapters, each one of which is summarized, fit into the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries and across the world. The volume editors indicate points of connection between the chapters in order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Braund and Torlone emphasize that a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies; they therefore consider it important to extrapolate larger phenomena from the specifics presented here

Consensus by Schooling and Power: The Indoctrination of the Elites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Government Institutions ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Chapter 7 describes the origins of the Chicago School and its successful projection into the hearts and minds of the global ruling class. Working chronologically, there is a description of how this program took root in Chicago and how some of its central figures, Friedman and Harberger, undertook a hemispheric campaign to capture both academic and government institutions. A history of the deregulation movement in the US and case studies of Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil highlight the breadth and depth of the campaign. The chapter closes in Europe where the neoliberal insurgency faced more-developed social states. Its success varied in Britain, France, and Germany.

AI Narratives

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imaginative Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real artificial intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing prehistory of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerged alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI’s social, ethical, and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphization, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.

The Musicality of Canadian Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 390-408
Author(s):  
Michael Brendan Baker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Account

This chapter offers a narrative account of music in Canadian cinema that highlights the contributions of its pioneers. Case studies spanning the critically acclaimed, the curious, and the marginalized allow for an effort to flesh out the place of music, particularly popular music, in this national cinema. While the esthetics and dollars-and-cents of music in film may be similar in Canada as elsewhere, the expectations of filmmakers and audiences are perhaps uniquely Canadian as a result of industrial and institutional forces. Animation, the avant-garde, and documentary are particularly vibrant spaces for the innovative use of music and differentiate the history of music in Canadian cinema from other more commercially oriented contexts.

Pandemics

2018 ◽  
pp. 646-662
Author(s):  
Kathryn H. Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
International Cooperation ◽  
Recovery Phase ◽  
Noncommunicable Diseases ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Global Action ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Goals

This chapter discusses the history of and responses to global epidemics of serious diseases. Case studies of cholera, influenza, and HIV/AIDS illustrate typical reactions to pandemic events. The initial stages of a pandemic are often characterized by collective anxiety and a desire for isolation. As the pandemic progresses, there are calls for collective global responses to protect human security and contain outbreaks while maintaining international trade and travel. As pandemics enter a recovery phase, there is often a shift toward the use of advocacy to promote international cooperation, secure continued funding for global health activities, and advance other strategic goals. The rhetoric of pandemics is now being used to describe obesity and other emerging noncommunicable diseases because the language of pandemics connotes risk and demands global action. Pandemics are the result of global interactions and globalization processes, and studies of pandemics are, by definition, global studies.

The socio-economic and demographic characteristics of port cities: a typology for comparative analysis?

Urban History ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lee
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Common Factors ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Merchant Capital ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACTThis article addresses a range of conceptual issues relating to the history of European port cities in order to construct a framework for comparative research. Port cities played a key role in European urban development and their growth was often determined by common factors. Particular attention is paid to the demography of port cities, their specific labour markets and the dominant ideology of merchant capital. The article establishes a basis for analysing case studies of individual port cities and for exploring their location within the overall process of European urbanization.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

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