This symposium starts from two central questions. First: are we facing a significant transformation of the human relationship with the world, or an intensification of already existing dynamics under a new technical surface? Second: what role should anthropology play, as a science, in this context of accelerated implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools?
\nTo address the first question, we draw on two traditions that have theorized the relationship between technology, society and human experience. The first holds that late modernity is characterized by an increasingly instrumental and less resonant relationship with the world, an acceleration that transforms not only what we do but how we relate to what surrounds us (Hartmut Rosa). The second, coming from the anthropology of technology, has shown that technological agency is never autonomous: it is always distributed, negotiated and dependent on the concrete context in which it unfolds (Lucy Suchman). Both perspectives allow us to ask whether AI effectively reconfigures our relationship with the world, or whether it rather deepens processes of instrumentalization that already existed before its arrival.
\nWe start from the premise that AI not only automates tasks, but mediates and reconfigures the ways in which people relate to things, to knowledge and to one another. An everyday example (a dental consultation mediated by algorithmic diagnosis) illustrates how the introduction of AI systems is not neutral: it redistributes trust and transforms the very experience of care. Analogous phenomena occur in the production of knowledge, where epistemic authority is called into question, and in labor, where open questions arise: does AI create less competent workers, or does it facilitate their tasks? These cases occur at a moment of cleavage: these technologies are only beginning to be implemented at scale, and we do not yet know whether the promise of a technological revolution will be fulfilled, or whether its actual relevance will fall well short of the expectations placed on it. This uncertain character is, in itself, an object of anthropological inquiry.
\nA cross-cutting axis of the symposium is the role that anthropology should assume in the face of the accelerated introduction of these technologies. Beyond documenting and anticipating their effects, we are interested in placing a more radical question at the center: does anthropology have a merely reactive role (analyzing the effects of AI once implemented), or should it actively propose a possible world, against which these tools might then be evaluated according to their contribution or their contradiction? This question guides the ultimate purpose of the symposium: not only to record transformations, but to discuss the discipline’s normative place in relation to them.
\nWe invite empirical and theoretical papers on the relationship between AI and social transformation, in any sphere of human life, and on the place of anthropology in this process. We seek contributions that engage with the congress’s thematic axis “Technologies: Power, Culture and Society,” whether through situated case studies or conceptual reflection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[44],"class_list":["post-10317","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-antropologia-y-antropologia-social"],"yoast_head":"\n