JANUARY 31, 2025
James E. Dobson, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing
Special Advisor to the Provost for AI
Director of the Writing Program
Dartmouth College
About the Presentation: In this talk, I reconstruct the historical development of governing mechanisms that have both shaped and emerged to leverage twentieth- and twenty-first-century machine learning technologies. I will focus primarily on the relatively recent turn away from longstanding social and statistical concepts such as the average and norm to probabilistic and predictive modeling. Despite contemporary rhetoric emphasizing personalization, this shift reflects a broader transition from the personal to the impersonal. By tracing the evolution of these paradigms in relation to their contemporary computer vision and machine learning methods, I will argue that new techniques often remain embedded in earlier social and cultural contexts. In each moment, however, there are dominant modes that present an undue and overdetermining influence on individual perception and behavior and make themselves invaluable in the administration of these individuals by the state, corporations, and other actors.
About the Presenter: James E. Dobson is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing, director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, and special advisor to the Provost for AI at Dartmouth College. He is the author of, among other books, The Birth of the Computer Vision (2022) and Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (2019). He is the co-author of a forthcoming creative and biographical reading of machine learning researcher Frank Rosenblatt titled Perceptron.