Upcoming Events
Tarleton Gillespie Visiting Lecture
A Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Affiliated Professor at Cornell University, Tarleton Gillespie will be visiting AI&U on September 30, 2026 to give a lecture entitled “Question. Answer. Repeat.” In this talk, Tarleton Gillespie will trace its antecedents, technologies that use the prompt-response form to structure users’ relationship to a massive corpus of information. Then, turning to the study of media, he will consider what we know about artificial persona to which users may nevertheless feel connected: from puppetry to fictional characters to game avatars to celebrities. Media scholarship has grappled with how artificial persona can nevertheless be an object of parasocial engagement, while cloaking both the artifice and the corporations looking to profit from it.
Minds, Machines, and Managers: Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence
Join AI&U Internal Fellow Devin Kennedy to discuss his new book, Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy, on October 30, 2026, from 12:00pm-1:00pm at Memorial Union, Room Information Shared Upon Registration (Please RSVP to be added to the waitlist). In this book, he offers a new account of computing since 1947, situating developments in computer science and technology in the context of US economic history. The book shows how computer science–often before it had that name–cut its teeth addressing problems among the manufacturing and financial industries that were early adopters of computer systems.