Silicon Valley’s tech titans have not only dazzled us with their brilliant technological inventions and innovations, but also captivated us with their idealistic talk of social justice and utopian visions of a brave new world. For decades, the immense economic, political, and cultural power of Silicon Valley has gone largely unquestioned, but is it the answer to humanity’s problems or a threat to humanity as we know it?
Often, the Humanities and Arts are reduced to “soft skills,” “business ethics” and “product design” while humanistic traditions of creativity and contemplation are appropriated to boost productivity and profit. But as technology changes what it means and how it means to be human, we need to redefine H&A’s relationship to tech and integrate/embed the Humanities/Arts deeply into every aspect of tech. Paralleling the notion of deep learning in computer science, the concept of Deep Humanities deals with the deep structures of culture, communication, and interpretation, networks of affect, belief and bias, representations of cognition and consciousness, as well as theoretical models of ethics, aesthetics, and humanism. As such, “Deep Humanities and Deep Arts” aims to bring our cumulative accumulated knowledge about the practice of being human to engage the urgent issues raised by emerging technologies and the tech industry.
Join us for two panel discussions, filled with ethicists, scientists, a New York Times Bestselling author, and many others. While we also take a break between panels to engage with students in a poster session where students present their research.
Free and open to all.