Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
Sweden
event
Human Futures, Machine Pasts: Rethinking AI through Cultural Memory and Imagination
The Thunberg Lecture Hall, SCAS & Zoom Webinar
Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt
LECTURE - Human Futures, Machine Pasts: Rethinking AI through Cultural Memory and Imagination
Speaker: Anna Foka, Professor of Digital Humanities, Uppsala University.
ABSTRACT:
The opening keynote explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping not only the way societies imagine the future but also how we understand the past and define humanity itself. Drawing from cultural heritage, digital humanities, and critical AI studies, it argues that the technologies driving automation and prediction are deeply entangled with inherited cultural narratives, biases, and epistemologies. By tracing the historical continuities between past imaginaries of intelligence and today’s algorithmic systems, the lecture highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches that foreground ethics, creativity, and global diversity. Ultimately, it asks how the humanities can help us reclaim agency and meaning in an increasingly automated world—turning AI from an object of control into a shared space of interpretation and reflection.
ABOUT:
Anna Foka is Professor of Digital Humanities at Uppsala University and the cluster PI of the Wallenberg national research cluster AI Futures of Culture and Memory. Anna Foka is National Mentor for AI in the Swedish South Korea Collaboration in the Research and Innovation Programme (SKERIC). Foka’s work focuses on the cultural and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence, digital heritage, and interdisciplinary methods across the humanities and technology. She has published widely on digital transformation in museums, archives, and cultural institutions, and currently leads several international projects on AI, sustainability, and cultural knowledge infrastructures. Her latest books are AI and Image (Cambridge University Press) and Evolving Perspectives in Digital Classics (Routledge).
The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) and the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS) are together launching a new international research initiative, Human Futures – AI Transitions in a Global Context, carried out in collaboration with Tokyo College (Japan). and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS, South Africa).
This open keynote lecture is part of the first workshop in a series of three.