The African Humanities after the AI rupture : A chatham house lunchtime seminar

WISER and the SA-UK SARChI Chair in the Digital Humanities warmly invite you to join us for a Chatham House lunchtime seminar on :

The African Humanities after the AI rupture. The seminar will bring together people with interests in this area from across the university to consider a number of related problems.

1. Is the Sarah Connor strategy – a deliberate policy of isolating our selves and lives from the infrastructures of machine intelligence – a viable one? 
2. Does the adoption of AI within the humanities allow us to pursue philosophical problems that are both novel and potentially liberating?
3. What does the universal adoption of AI agents do to the humanities project of reading and writing, and what are the likely effects on the university? 
4. How do current university policies -- at WIts and elsewhere -- help us to navigate and address these problems? 
5. What can we learn from comparing the US and the Chinese approaches to the adoption and regulation of AI systems?

To support the discussion we have assembled a short list of short readings.

• The recent substack from Arvind Narayanan “What will be left for us to work on?” https://substack.com/home/post/p-206741609;  
• A recent lecture from Iginio Gagliardone in the SSRC’s African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics Programme; 
• Overview reports on the Hugging Face attack from Casey Newton and Zvi Mowshowitz; 
• Something like the official line from the Chinese Communist Party on AI regulation from Pekingnology; 
• A detailed Bloomberg report on the reception of Chinese open weight models; 
• And the Faculty of Humanities' summaries of AI policy.

We also recommend that people interested in these problems attend the Dwolatzky Memorial Lecture by Shakir Mohamed next Wednesday, September 16, or watch it at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2IBLzdVZA

Please RSVP for catering purposes to najibha.deshmukh@wits.ac.za.