Workshop: 'Demystifying AI'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- S211 (Paul Webley Building, SOAS)
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
About this event
This workshop explores generative AI, how computers actually work, and how digital technologies have reshaped work, culture, politics, and the economy — while questioning the metaphors we use to understand them.
Led by Taylor Rockhill, this seminar explores how AI evolved from a speculative idea into a cultural and technological phenomenon, and why our hopes and fears about intelligent machines continue to shape the digital age.
Alan Turing’s early computer research helped to popularise the idea of 'electronic brains', paving the way for artificial intelligence to become a major theme in science fiction and popular culture. From dystopian figures such as HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Skynet (The Terminator) to sympathetic characters like Data ('Star Trek: The Next Generation') and R2-D2 ('Star Wars'), fictional AI shaped public perceptions of technology, while the term itself evolved from video games and software to voice assistants and, more recently, large language models such as ChatGPT.
Image credit: Matthieu Beaumont, Unsplash
