How can science help us understand ethical issues in sports?
Monday, November 8, 2021, 5 PM | Theatre of the Arts, University of Waterloo, in-person and livestreamed | REGISTER
Artificial intelligence will take your job! Genetic engineering will accelerate the loss of biodiversity! The modern smart-city is a privacy disaster! Killer robots and technological progress are out of control! Is the techno-apocalypse upon us? Should we run for the exit? Or are there more nuanced ways to understand the complex interaction between technology and society and values?
Join us on October 28 at 4pm, in-person or virtually via livestream, for Critical Tech Talk 4: Batya Friedman!
Join us to watch and discuss a performance of Karel Čapek's (1920) play "Rossum's Universal Robots," the work that introduced the word and concept of "robot" to the world.
When robots rise up, will humanity fall?
See you on November 10 at 7pm in E5 6006. Free admittance & free popcorn!
This performance is a presentation of Battle Damage Theater.
The Critical Media Lab is excited to invite you to register for Critical Tech Talk 11: Speculative Imaginaries and Technological Design with guest speaker Sherryl Vint, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, on how speculative fiction can help us cultivate a more inclusive social imagination.
This is a virtual event taking place on Zoom, Friday January 24th at 3:00 PM. Full details are below. Registration is required using this link.
We look forward to you joining us!
About the talk: Speculative fiction (sf) is an influential mode that shapes how we imagine what technologies and futures we find desirable, feasible, and valuable. But whose values inform imagined techno-utopian futures? How can we draw on the power of sf if we understand the genre not as a storehouse of technologies we might one day create, but instead as a critical engagement with the way that technology inevitably shapes the social world in ways that extend far beyond its intended use? Using the example of the intersection of sf with disability studies, this talk will outline how sf can function as a mode of enquiry, a rhetorical tool that can help us guide technological development toward greater inclusion and equity by opening new perspectives on the problems technology seeks to solve. Focusing on the specific example of sf written from the perspective of people with disability, it will show how such fictions can help us understand how to cultivate a more capacious social imagination as a crucial element of equitable and inclusive technological design.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2021), and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and editor of book series Science in Popular Culture.
Join us to enjoy and discuss the classic Sci-Fi movie Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott! Free popcorn! Free admittance! Screening followed by a discussion of the movie's relation to technology and society today!
Open to all Waterloo students, staff, and faculty.
See you March 4 @ 6:30pm in E5 6004!