Agenda

Workshop series
Language in Minds, Machines, and Milieus: A Modern Perspective on AI
Workshop series June-July 2024

The ERC project AIMODELS at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice organises a series of workshops to explore the intellectual and social history that prefigures the rise of AI in the 21st century.

All workshops are also part of the activities of the Political Epistemology Research Network and in collaboration with other research groups. For proposing a paper or registering write to Prof. Matteo Pasquinelli matteo.pasquinelli@unive.it.

Workshop IV - 5 July 2024

The interdisciplinary workshop explores how the concept of extinction influences the apparatuses of boundary-making in both linguistics and natural sciences. Today, the pressing issue of language and species endangerment is prominently featured on the agendas of nation states, international organisations, and hi-tech corporations. This attention is driven by an extensive use of big data and statistical modelling both in Natural Language Processing (see: Digital Language Death, Kornai 2013) and conservation efforts. In the 19th century, mass species extinction was initially brought to light through statistical modelling within the emerging field of palaeontology. In the second half of the 20th century, the term biocultural diversity emerged from a new appraisal of extinction as a threat to both biological and cultural resources (Sepkoski 2020). Subsequently, the comprehension of extinction evolved into a problem of computing risk and the extinction of species and languages: it transitioned from naturalizing the colonial ecocide and genocide to organizing biological and cultural diversity into taxonomies of endangerment (Baldwin et al. 2018). The workshop addresses the notion of extinction of languages and biological life in the current political and academic landscape and considers whether the categories of national tongues and enclosures can be applied to these human and nonhuman, digital and offline modes of accumulation.

Chair: Paolo Caffoni and Mariana Silva, HfG Karlsruhe
Mariana Silva, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Extinction’s Beasts of Burden: Modeling Risk’
Paolo Caffoni, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘​The Resource Debate in Machine Translation and Large Language Models’
Boris Buden, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Digital Extinction of Languages and the Politics of Translation’
Britta Schneider, Europa-Universität Viadrina, ‘Multilingualism and Normativity in Digital Society’
Julian Asbäck, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Simulating the Apocalypse: On the Language of Uncertainty in Climate Modelling’
Marco Tamborini, Technische Universität Darmstadt, ‘The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge’
Discussants: Giulia Rispoli and Matteo Pasquinelli, Ca’ Foscari University