From autonomous vehicles to robot care-givers, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming how we work, live and understand what it means to be human.

Occupations that have long been the responsibility of humans are now the work of machines. The implications of these changes for employment and economic stability have been the subject of lively debates among economists, policy experts and politicians. But automation will alter life far beyond work, reorganizing social relations and challenging some of our core values around equality, political representation, and human autonomy.

In partnership with the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, along with the Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Historical Association (AHA), the Chicago Humanities Festival will convene a two-part summit bringing prominent humanists together to explore the limits and potential of automation.

N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, and Evan Selinger, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in conversation with Hilary Strang, director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, will explore the imaginative potentials of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) from the vantage points of literature, cultural theory, and beyond. Anne Ruggles Gere, President of the Modern Language Association, will introduce the first part of the 2019 National Humanities Summit, “Cultural Potentials."

This project is supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, based at the Illinois Program for the Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Humanities Without Walls consortium is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.