Books by Kevin LaGrandeur
An edited collection of essays by important thinkers on the future of work in an increasingly aut... more An edited collection of essays by important thinkers on the future of work in an increasingly automated economy. This book examines the current state of technologically-caused unemployed, and attempts to answer the question of how to proceed into an era beyond technological unemployment. Beginning with an overview of the most salient issues, the experts collected in this work present their own novel visions of the future and offer suggestions for adapting to a more symbiotic economic relationship with AI. These suggestions include different modes of dealing with education, aging workers, government policies, and the machines themselves. Ultimately, they lay out a whole new approach to economics, one in which we learn to merge with and adapt to our increasingly intelligent creations. Edited and with chapters by Kevin LaGrandeur and James Hughes, published by Palgrave Macmillan. [YOU CAN READ SOME OF IT AT GOOGLE BOOKS, HERE: https://books.google.com/books?id=oo5cDgAAQBAJ&pg=PR1&lpg=PR1&dq=surviving+the+machine+age&source=bl&ots=anh4mgvfYe&sig=qKEGbBH05g8R7odnULs2qThOv0M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqlLel44PTAhVk7YMKHUR3AUkQ6AEINTAE#v=onepage&q&f=false
This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networ... more This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networks by fictional and non-fictional scientists of the early modern period. Beginning with an investigation of the roots of artificial servants, humanoids, and automata from earlier times, LaGrandeur traces how these literary representations coincide with a surging interest in automata and experimentation, and how they blend with the magical science that proceeded the empirical era. These representations eerily prefigure modern robots, androids, and artificially intelligent networks, and the art that is responsible for their creation blurs the edges between magic and science in a way that resonates especially with modern notions of cybernetics. In the instances that this book considers, the idea of the artificial factotum is connected with an emotional paradox: the joy of self-enhancement is counterpoised with the anxiety of self-displacement that comes with distribution of agency. In this way, the older accounts of creating artificial slaves are accounts of modernity in the making—a modernity characterized by the project of extending the self and its powers, in which the vision of the extended self is fundamentally inseparable from the vision of an attenuated self. This book discusses the idea that fictional, artificial servants embody at once the ambitions of the scientific wizards who make them and society’s perception of the dangers of those ambitions, and represent the cultural fears triggered by independent, experimental thinkers—the type of thinkers from whom our modern cyberneticists directly descend.
Articles & Book Chapters by Kevin LaGrandeur
Frankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon: The Science and Enduring Allure of Mary Shelley’s Creation., 2018
For the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's book, I interviewed the famous dir... more For the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's book, I interviewed the famous director, actor, and comedian Mel Brooks about his movie "Young Frankenstein" and how its making reflects Shelley's novel.
Mimetic Posthumanism: Homo Mimeticus 2.0 in Art, Philosophy and Technics, 2024
AI's potential power is so frightening that some of its leading makers think we need to implant ... more AI's potential power is so frightening that some of its leading makers think we need to implant it in ourselves to keep up. My new chapter here discusses this and some examples: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004692053/BP000020.xml
Directors & Boards, 2024
Our Ethical Compliance Model is a way that a corporate board can ensure that it stays within reco... more Our Ethical Compliance Model is a way that a corporate board can ensure that it stays within recognized ethical boundaries in its company's use of AI. It is based on nine broad ethical principles for making and using AI that are recognized widely in government, industry and academia. The model is used in five steps, which, along with the 9 essential ethical principles for using AI, are described in this short article.
Journal of Posthumanism, 2024
(click DOI link above for full article) Today’s emerging technologies provide possibilities for r... more (click DOI link above for full article) Today’s emerging technologies provide possibilities for radical therapy for human diseases and disabilities, as well as radical enhancement and alteration of human abilities. This article discusses both the positive and negative possibilities of three current emerging technologies for therapy and bioenhancement—brain-computer interfaces, prosthetic memory, and transcranial direct current stimulation—as well as fictional narratives that prefigure these innovations. The author argues that the particular dangers of current radical emerging technologies that could enhance brain processing speed, alter or enhance memory, and affect mental states are prefigured by fictional stories that anticipate these real innovations.
The Pentacle, 2024
This interview with me by Basak Agin and Safak Horzum of The Pentacle is about posthumanism, its ... more This interview with me by Basak Agin and Safak Horzum of The Pentacle is about posthumanism, its history, its networks, and some of the people who have been important to its development. Article available here: https://thepentacle.org/2024/06/02/interview-with-kevin-lagrandeur/
AI & Ethics, 2023
AI promises to be a potentially beneficial innovation if it can be wisely built and adopted. One ... more AI promises to be a potentially beneficial innovation if it can be wisely built and adopted. One of the impediments to its wise use that is not discussed enough is the tendency toward exaggerating the capabilities of AI, or “hyping” it. AI hype increases the possibility of bad consequences for society, including compromised public safety, and even faulty social, business, and educational practices. Three case studies given here regarding AI used for self-driving automobile functions, law practice, and worker displacement illustrate these dangers.
Global AI Ethics Institute, 2023
We at the Global AI Ethics Institute did a survey about this topic in order to prompt discussion ... more We at the Global AI Ethics Institute did a survey about this topic in order to prompt discussion about it across disciplines. We called on our members and general audience of experts to contribute to this survey, and we collected a number of thoughtful theoretical viewpoints that are summarized in this article. The human-experienced history of time is deeply rooted in the tight relation between living creatures and their environments. So far, it seems that relationship, and many other aspects of the relation between time and experience, have gone totally unexplored with regard to AI.
Posthumanism in Multidisciplinary Studies (Çokdisiplinli Çalışmalarda Posthümanizm), 2022
Our world is in trouble. Climates are changing, oceans rising, storms becoming more extreme and u... more Our world is in trouble. Climates are changing, oceans rising, storms becoming more extreme and unpredictable, more animals are becoming extinct, the gap between rich and poor is increasing, as is social disruption, and dangerous wars are looming. Things don't look promising. Can posthumanism rescue us, our fellow living things, and our planet from demise? Maybe.
Journal of Posthumanism, 2021
In sympathy with Francesca Ferrando's book Philosophical Posthumanism, this brief article elabor... more In sympathy with Francesca Ferrando's book Philosophical Posthumanism, this brief article elaborates on a parallel topic: the ethical implications of current projects to modify humans and their society by using digital emerging technology. [FREE ACCESS TO FULL TEXT HERE: Journal of Posthumanism vol. 1, no. 2, Dec. 2021, pp. 195-8, https://journals.tplondon.com/jp/article/view/1718]
Journal of Posthumanism, 2021
[FREE ARTICLE ACCESS HERE: https://journals.tplondon.com/jp/article/view/1185/989]
Neuralink, ... more [FREE ARTICLE ACCESS HERE: https://journals.tplondon.com/jp/article/view/1185/989]
Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk three years ago, is the most notable of several companies developing a new type of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI): a direct, two-way, digital system that is robust, compact, and wireless. BCI is already being used therapeutically to reduce seizures in severe epileptics, resolve tremors in Parkinson’s patients, and to stabilize mood disorders in psychiatric patients. But the devices used to do this are bulky and hardwired, causing difficulty of use for patients and requiring invasive surgeries and large incisions to implant them. So, researchers have been trying to make these devices more compact, easier to implant, and wireless.
AI and Ethics Journal, 2020
[This is the link for this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-020-00010-7]... more [This is the link for this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-020-00010-7] This article shows how our reliance on artificially intelligent tools goes surprisingly far back in history, as do our fears about doing so. After discussing how these devices and fears about them appear in ancient literature and recent literature, both factual and fictional, I then examine the potential mishaps that cause such fears, especially in the recent past and the present. All this leads to the question of regulation: whether and how we might do it, which is discussed in the concluding section.
IEET.org [Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology], 2020
AI-based applications used for tracking and isolating people with the Covid 19 virus are problem... more AI-based applications used for tracking and isolating people with the Covid 19 virus are problematic. There are three big problems with these kinds of tools.
AI Narratives, 2020
This chapter, which is part of the new book AI NARRATIVES: A HISTORY OF IMAGINATIVE THINKING ABOU... more This chapter, which is part of the new book AI NARRATIVES: A HISTORY OF IMAGINATIVE THINKING ABOUT INTELLIGENT MACHINES, EDS. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon (Oxford University Press, 2020), shows how Renaissance stories of the golem of Prague, of Paracelsus’s homunculus, and of a talking brass head built by a natural philosopher in Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay show the fears and hopes embedded in that culture’s reactions to human invention—as well as an ambivalence to the idea of slavery, for intelligent objects are almost uniformly proxies for indentured servants. Renaissance tales of the golem spring from Eastern Europe, especially Prague, and depict the creation of an artificial humanoid to help protect the Jewish citizenry from harm. The golem is chiefly a product of Cabalistic magic, which is precisely this sort of secretive and formulaic magic that contemporaneously underpins claims by scientists of the period, such as Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, to have made tiny humans (homunculi) in flasks. The written claims of these scientists affect and reflect fiction of the period, such as Greene’s play about Bacon, whose transgressive experimentation with a talking, metal humanoid head depicts the dangers of newfangled ideas.
In sum, the tales examined in this chapter about artificial servants that predate the modern era signal ambivalence about our innate technological abilities—an ambivalence that anticipates today’s concerns. These artificial servants’ promises of vastly increased power over our own natural limits are countervailed by fears about being overwhelmed by our own ingenuity.
Early Modern Culture Online, Jan 2020
Making Weconomy: Collaborative Enterprise Magazine, 2018
Futurists tend to exaggerate, overestimating the change that’s heading our way; however, signific... more Futurists tend to exaggerate, overestimating the change that’s heading our way; however, significant changes to humanity are coming nevertheless. Most likely there will be no new species, no destructive post-human scenario, no sci-fi movie style acceleration of evolution. However, what we can say or even predict with certainty is that the way we interact with the world and with the machines of the future will change. Human beings will remain human, but their relationship with objects will be deeper, a kind technological intimacy. [NOTE: ARTICLE BEGINS ON P. 22]
For visual artists, the incipient elements of the posthuman identified in this article signal ch... more For visual artists, the incipient elements of the posthuman identified in this article signal change in how art is produced and under whose agency, what human art means, and even what being human means—given the blurring of how we define the concept of " human " in a rapidly changing posthuman environment.
[NOTE: This is an early draft of the introductory chapter of our book Surviving the Machine Age: ... more [NOTE: This is an early draft of the introductory chapter of our book Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). For the final version, see the book. It can be found at books.google.com, or at Palgrave’s website.]
Many economists and experts have begun to argue that the increasing automation of jobs may finally create a decline of available jobs for humans. Given this pessimism, there is a need to look more closely at the questions concerning not only whether technological employment will happen, but also at some specific scenarios for it, whether we might avoid it, and some options we may have to do so. This chapter introduces these issues. It also points toward and summarizes arguments that are developed in the other chapters of the book, by experts from the fields of economics, philosophy and law who are involved in the study of technological unemployment.
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Books by Kevin LaGrandeur
Articles & Book Chapters by Kevin LaGrandeur
Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk three years ago, is the most notable of several companies developing a new type of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI): a direct, two-way, digital system that is robust, compact, and wireless. BCI is already being used therapeutically to reduce seizures in severe epileptics, resolve tremors in Parkinson’s patients, and to stabilize mood disorders in psychiatric patients. But the devices used to do this are bulky and hardwired, causing difficulty of use for patients and requiring invasive surgeries and large incisions to implant them. So, researchers have been trying to make these devices more compact, easier to implant, and wireless.
In sum, the tales examined in this chapter about artificial servants that predate the modern era signal ambivalence about our innate technological abilities—an ambivalence that anticipates today’s concerns. These artificial servants’ promises of vastly increased power over our own natural limits are countervailed by fears about being overwhelmed by our own ingenuity.
Many economists and experts have begun to argue that the increasing automation of jobs may finally create a decline of available jobs for humans. Given this pessimism, there is a need to look more closely at the questions concerning not only whether technological employment will happen, but also at some specific scenarios for it, whether we might avoid it, and some options we may have to do so. This chapter introduces these issues. It also points toward and summarizes arguments that are developed in the other chapters of the book, by experts from the fields of economics, philosophy and law who are involved in the study of technological unemployment.
Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk three years ago, is the most notable of several companies developing a new type of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI): a direct, two-way, digital system that is robust, compact, and wireless. BCI is already being used therapeutically to reduce seizures in severe epileptics, resolve tremors in Parkinson’s patients, and to stabilize mood disorders in psychiatric patients. But the devices used to do this are bulky and hardwired, causing difficulty of use for patients and requiring invasive surgeries and large incisions to implant them. So, researchers have been trying to make these devices more compact, easier to implant, and wireless.
In sum, the tales examined in this chapter about artificial servants that predate the modern era signal ambivalence about our innate technological abilities—an ambivalence that anticipates today’s concerns. These artificial servants’ promises of vastly increased power over our own natural limits are countervailed by fears about being overwhelmed by our own ingenuity.
Many economists and experts have begun to argue that the increasing automation of jobs may finally create a decline of available jobs for humans. Given this pessimism, there is a need to look more closely at the questions concerning not only whether technological employment will happen, but also at some specific scenarios for it, whether we might avoid it, and some options we may have to do so. This chapter introduces these issues. It also points toward and summarizes arguments that are developed in the other chapters of the book, by experts from the fields of economics, philosophy and law who are involved in the study of technological unemployment.
The idea of the posthuman--the transformation of humanity by its convergence with emerging technology--is a big new philosophical and scientific concept, and big new philosophical
or scientific concepts often cause paradigm shifts in the way we think about our world, about
ourselves, and about our relation to the universe. And that, in turn, changes art. Which changes us,
because art reflects and anticipates our struggles to absorb and assimilate new ideas and how they
relate to us.
wizards, who use the information inherent in symbolic, programming language—their own form
of incantations—to program systems that embody impressive aspects of human cognitive capabilities and, often, formidable physical power. Coding is the primary tool of modern
scientists and gamers who try to make digital artifacts, and coded incantations that derive from occult knowledge are the first methods that Renaissance scientists resorted to when trying to
create and control their artificial servants and intelligent artifacts. This coded correspondence between words and reality goes beyond metaphor in the realm of artificial servants and artifacts
in both the modern and early modern periods. In the case of the sixteenth century legends of the golem, for instance, the Cabalistic combinations of the Hebrew alphabet and the various secret names of God that its creator chanted literally made flesh out of earth. In the modern world, the special codes comprised of algorithmic combinations of words, numbers, and symbols that
today’s computer specialists type into their machines actually weave together the fabric of virtual worlds and creatures like bots and, in some modern systems theory and in the world of science
fiction, have the potential to create full-fledged human simulacra, such as the robots in Asimov’s I, Robot, and the avatars in online games.
--What skills are least “automate-able” in the next decade?
--What middle class professions have the greatest risk of automation, and what should those professionals be doing now to hedge against job loss?
--What should business leaders be doing now to prepare for “phasing out” work while still taking care of their employees?
Keynote: Natasha Vita-More. Attendance is free, registration is required.
Keynote: Prof. Katherine Hayles (UCLA / Duke University)
The CFP is now open (deadline: December 31st 2019).
Info:
https://nyposthuman2020.weebly.com/cfp.html
www.posthumans.org / Global Symposiums / NYU 2020 / CFP
The Committee:
Prof. Francesca Ferrando (NYU), Prof. Kevin Lagrandeur (NYIT), Prof. Farzad Mahootian (NYU), Prof. Jim McBride (NYU), Prof. Yunus Tuncel (NYU).