The initial motivation behind this website and network was to critically engage with the discourse on technology, with a specific interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Today, the concept of AI is used to designate so many different processes, systems, devices, dreams and ideas that it almost loses any real meaning. The discourse on AI is particularly saturated with reified metaphors that influence connotations and delimit the understanding and the adoption of technologies in society. Therefore, even academic papers often consider it necessary or inevitable to dwell on the comparison between human and machine intelligence.
Is this comparison justified?
Earlier, AI has been seen as applied semiotics because it ventures to manipulate symbols or signs (Meunier 1989). At the same time, all computer systems—including AI—are essentially semiotic technologies, allowing for human cognition and agency to be extended, delegated and offloaded in various manners and at different scales (Irvine 2022).
The beginnings
This repository started as a spinoff from the 2023 winter school on AI and society held at Palacký University Olomouc. I wanted to offer further opportunity to follow and engage in the discourse that has become the focus of my research – at the intersection of technology, society, and semiotics, on my own terms. Therefore, this site strives to be a resource and study centre, as well as a research network. It is a project under development and it will take a while to assemble the knowledge and references gathered over several years of my PhD studies. In time, there will be online courses on semiotics, technology, society, social constructionism and the environment.
For now, it is an academically-oriented network used to facilitate communication in and around the courses on technosemiotics that I have taught or am teaching in the near future. If you feel interested in and like-minded regarding the topics discussed and displayed here, you are welcome to get in touch.
You can read more about my interests and activities on my researcher website and find my most up-to-date affiliations and contacts in my ORCiD profile.
Thank you for visiting!
~ Auli Viidalepp