In this talk acclaimed sociologist Anthony Elliott explores the profound and unsettling impacts of artificial intelligence on our lives in these times. Addressing the complexity of the digital revolution – spanning machine intelligence, chatbots, advanced robotics, accelerating automation and big data – the focus is on how emerging technologies ‘rewrite’ forms of social interaction, organisational life and institutional governance. The argument is that economy and society in the current age have come to mean smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, big data, automated recommendation systems and predictive analytics. This has heralded the arrival of what Elliott terms ‘algorithmic modernity’, an altogether new ‘stage’ in the technological and cultural ordering of modern societies. In this brave new world, human agency is increasingly outsourced to smart machines. We should understand this phenomenon in terms of an intensification of opportunity and fear, as AI becomes increasingly enmeshed with fundamental disruption and anxieties about the future.
