Kalindi Vora - AI and the Crisis of the Human

The question of what it means to be human is at the center of public discourse surrounding our interactions with so-called artificial intelligence, presenting a critical opportunity for feminist and anti-racist anthropology. This talk engages with the current moment of meaning-making in the face of emerging technologies to revisit postcolonial, decolonial, and Black studies critiques of the human and of post-Enlightenment reason. These fields have long worked to recover submerged, silenced, or otherwise erased histories of the colonized, offering alternative accounts of who counts as a subject and what forms of life are possible. Drawing on preliminary fieldwork in AI ethics spaces in Europe and the U.S., alongside speculative AI designs that challenge dominant norms, this talk explores the potential of redescribing the human (Wynter 2003) as a foundation for confronting the exclusion of marginalized worldviews from modernity.