Tanner Lectures on Human Values

The Tanner Lectures with Ruha Benjamin: Imagining Beyond the Artificial Intelligentsia | Lecture One

This talk explores how the artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. At every turn, we hear echoes, in the rhetoric of the artificial intelligentsia, of a eugenic calculus: the weak must be sacrificed for the strong to survive. They promise to guide us into the Future™, positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they help engineer the crises against which we must guard. But it is not enough to refute the legacies of eugenics animating the faux futures of the artificial intelligentsia; we must inaugurate legacies of solidarity that reflect our intrinsic interdependence as a people and a planet.

In collaboration with the Office of the President of Harvard University, the MHC hosts annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The purpose of the Tanner Lectures is the advancement of scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values. That purpose embraces the entire range of moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and social – the full register of values pertinent to the human condition, interest, behavior, and aspiration. 

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Utah. They are funded by an endowment and other gifts received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. More information: www.tannerlectures.utah.edu.