Wearn Lecture: Who Owns the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Abundant Imagination
Dr. Ruha Benjamin will lecture on "Who Owns the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Abundant Imagination."
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto.
Ruha is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship.
In this talk, Dr. Benjamin takes a transdisciplinary approach to public scholarship, inviting us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and providing conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight. When it comes to AI, Benjamin shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives.
A book signing of "Imagination" will be held in the Atrium immediately following the lecture.
Free and open to the public; .