A Conversation with Dr. Melody Jue

UCSB Reads Ted Chiang

3 May, 2022

University of California-Santa Barbara

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Adapted from the 1998 short story “Story of Your Life” by acclaimed science fiction author Ted Chiang, “Arrival” (2016) centers on communicating with tentacular alien visitors, whose language changes one’s experience of time. Introspective and immersive, “Arrival” imagines a fantastical calligraphy alongside questions of alienation, race, and motherhood. Professor Jennifer Rhee joins Melody Jue to discuss the film and explore the dynamics of free will, determinism, disorientation, communication, language, and temporal nonlinearity, as well as the similarities and differences between the film and the original short story. Series: “Carsey-Wolf Center”

The term “anthropomorphic attachments” also refers to a method for thinking about, examining, and critiquing AI technologies. According to this method, anthropomorphization, a central organizing concept of AI, cannot be disentangled from dehumanization, because the concept of the human cannot be disentangled from dehumanization.

Anthropomorphic Attachments

2022

In Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition

To this end, we approach science and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science Book Cover

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

2020

Fortunati describes the hegemony of immaterial labor through its connection to forms of reproductive labor that were once located primarily within the domestic sphere. In digital capital, labor is increasingly immaterial and precarious as it makes its way outside of both the domestic sphere and the industrial factory.

The Robotic Imaginary Book Cover

The Robotic Imaginary
The Human & The Price of Dehumanized Labor

2018