Advanced Diploma in Artificial Intelligence and Social Sciences: Theoretical and Epistemological Challenges
1th Cohort | Virtual Modality
ACADEMIC COORDINATION
Flavia Costa (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Wolfgang Bongers (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile)
PROFESSORS
Flavia Costa (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina); Pablo Manolo Rodríguez (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina); Paola Ricaurte Quijano (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico); Gabriela Sued (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico); Alejandro Covello (University of Morón, Argentina); Wolfgang Bongers (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile); and Mariana Ferrarelli (University of San Andrés, Argentina).
Virtual format | August to November 2024
Start date : 26/08/2024 | Registration : 28/05/2024 to 25/08/2024
In recent years, particularly since the development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, LaMDA, and SORA, artificial intelligence has moved to the forefront of public discourse, and it is expected that in the near future it will have a profound impact on politics, the economy, work, culture, the arts, health, and education in different countries and societies. Consequently, debates about these sociotechnical systems and their effects on social life are currently a major focus for governments, universities, international organizations, technology corporations, and representatives of civil society.
Its opacity, both technical and social and political; its interactive complexity; the partially autonomous behavior inherent in technologies that include AI present a real challenge in terms of the possibility of its governance, which requires a conceptualization effort that has only just begun.
What exactly are these metatechnologies? At what scales do they operate? What are the benefits and dangers of their widespread deployment? What role can states and scientific and pedagogical knowledge play in addressing them? In this diploma program, we aim to offer a robust set of tools to tackle these questions and provide up-to-date information on the scientific, political, legal, artistic, and philosophical efforts underway to grasp the scale of the impending transformation.
There are different projections regarding the positive economic impact that the incorporation of AI into various production processes could have on our region. A 2020 study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) projected that this adoption could represent an opportunity for Latin America to increase its Gross Domestic Product by 14%.
Likewise, various sources point to the challenges and disruptive effects that must be acknowledged and mitigated throughout the adoption process. In March 2023, a group of experts from our region, meeting in Montevideo, highlighted “the productive potential of artificial intelligence systems, as well as the risks associated with their unreflective growth.” They also emphasized the need to “develop criteria and standards that allow these technologies to be clearly and transparently assessed according to their risks, in order to advance public policies that protect the common good without hindering the benefits of technological development.” This is due to the enormous power of AI to accelerate production processes and decision-making; because the introduction of AI impacts the world of work and education, forcing the rewriting of rules for entire industries; because of its capacity to instantly create content and news that may be false or erroneous; and because of its ability to generate situations where existing regulations are no longer adequate to address the problems facing society, thus creating what are known as regulatory gaps.
In this context, this diploma aims to provide tools to various technical and political teams—public policy developers, university authorities, those responsible for technology integration programs, teachers, researchers, and students from different disciplinary fields—to understand and organize existing information on initiatives in the field of Artificial Intelligence policies and regulations that are being developed in the region, in relation to other international reference initiatives.
It also seeks to present, from an interdisciplinary perspective, an original and productive viewpoint that allows us to identify the impacts of these new technologies on democratic quality, citizen participation, education, and even the hierarchies between different fields of knowledge and disciplines, which are being profoundly affected by the ongoing transformation.
We aim to present aspects of AI that are not usually visible but which we consider extremely useful for analyzing this event, as well as for promoting discussions on what national and regional strategies, policies and regulations are appropriate for the different countries that make up the region.
Finally, we propose to highlight—in a necessarily panoramic but not superficial reading—the state of the latest scientific, artistic, and political debates on the issue, so that those who are part of teams responsible for implementing AI-related policies are able to identify the fundamental aspects that must be taken into account to carry out initiatives for the development, adoption, monitoring, and risk mitigation of a truly reliable, democratic, and secure AI.
GENERAL PURPOSE
To provide a historical-critical training and an original analytical perspective to address the meaning and challenges of the massive development of Artificial Intelligence and, in particular, generative AI.
SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES
1. To provide an overview of the most recent debates concerning the political, social, economic, cultural, and epistemological challenges of AI in general, and generative AI in particular.
2. To provide tools to political and technical teams from various Latin American countries to understand and organize existing information on initiatives in the field of Artificial Intelligence policies and regulations that are being developed in the region, in relation to other international reference initiatives.
3. To foster a critical inter- and transdisciplinary perspective on the massive deployment of AI, focusing especially on the political, theoretical and epistemological challenges that this deployment poses to the social sciences and the humanities.
The Higher Diploma in Artificial Intelligence: Theoretical and Epistemological Challenges for the Social Sciences is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students; teachers at all levels; activists and members of trade unions, social movements and political parties; public officials; members and managers of non-governmental organizations and professionals interested in the subject.
The program consists of 5 modules of 3 weekly classes each, taught consecutively and linked together.
Total workload of 128 hours.
The modules that comprise the Higher Diploma are:
Class 1: TECHNOCENE, AI AND THE NEW INFORMATIONAL ORDER
Teacher: Flavia Costa
Conceptual summary of the class
Technocene: the epoch in which humankind becomes a geological agent. Through the technological unleashing of extremely high-intensity and high-risk energies, we leave traces in the soil, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the aquifers that have crossed or are about to cross thresholds of irreversibility. Expansion of the biopolitical battlefield and a new informational order: algorithmic governmentality and the governance of the public on a planetary scale.
Class 2: A BRIEF HISTORY OF AI AND A THEORETICAL-ANALYTICAL PROPOSAL
Teacher: Flavia Costa
Class 2: Conceptual synthesis of the class
“We inhabit a dream that began to be dreamt 80 years ago.” The foundations of AI: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts: neural networks. Alan Turing: child computers and the dialogue model. John McCarthy: an initial definition of AI. Steps toward systemic analytics: metatechnology, environment-world, artificial society, AI as a risky technology, the need to complement the ethical perspective with a systemic approach.
Class 3: EPISTEMOLOGIES OF THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM + AI. THREE SCALES AND SIX CROSS-CUTTING APPROACHES
Teacher: Flavia Costa
Conceptual summary of the class
Three scales (micro, meso, and macro) of generative artificial intelligence metatechnologies. Cross-cutting approaches: ethical-political approach from Latin America: towards a feminist and decolonial ethic. Normative approach: laws, regulations, recommendations; challenges to privacy, generative AI, and copyright. Political economy approach: geopolitics of AI; stakeholder mapping, cartographies, ownership systems. Systemic approach: complex sociotechnical systems; risk management, AI accident investigation. Media and cultural studies approach: meaning production, deep fake, simulation vs. presence? Philosophical approach: epistemologies and ontologies in question.
Class 4: GEOPOLITICS OF AI AND DAP SYSTEM
Teacher: Pablo Manolo Rodríguez
Conceptual summary of the class
Political economy approach. Surveillance capitalism, infrastructure, business model, ownership schemes. DAP system: data, algorithms, platforms.
Class 5: REGULATIONS AND STANDARDS IN PROCESS
Teacher: Pablo Manolo Rodríguez
Conceptual summary of the class
Legal-normative approach: laws, regulations, standards, recommendations; the challenges to privacy, generative AI and copyright.
Class 6: THE CHALLENGES OF AI FOR THE WORLD OF WORK
Teacher: Gabriela Sued
Conceptual summary of the class
Measuring the impact of AI on employment: fantasies and realities. Levels of exposure to generative AI: repetitive, craft, and "non-routine cognitive" jobs. Tensions with labor rights and intellectual property.
Class 7: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO AI. TOWARDS A FEMINIST AND DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE
Teacher: Paola Ricaurte Quijano
Conceptual summary of the class
Ethical-political approach. Hegemonic AI and epistemic violence: datafication (extraction and dispossession), algorithmization (mediation and governmentality), and automation (violence, inequality, and displacement of responsibility). Critical geopolitics of media and information. Towards a feminist and decolonial perspective.
Class 8: REBELLIOUS TECHNOPOLITICS, COLONIALITY OF POWER AND EMANCIPATORY USES OF AI
Teacher: Paola Ricaurte Quijano
Conceptual summary of the class
An ethical-political approach. From technological solutionism to critical thinking about technology. Reflective and critical proposals from Latin America to hack the technical code of surveillance capitalism. Can the internet be a space of emancipation? Was it ever: how, when, and why did it cease to be so? And if it were possible, in what sense would it be emancipatory, under what conditions, and through what practices? How can we imagine and practice technological sovereignty in a time of massification of technopolitical tools? Collective experiences: free software, cooperative platforms, and feminist and decolonial relational devices.
Class 9: ALGORITHMIC CULTURES, CREATIVITY FACTORIES, DISINFORMATION INDUSTRIES
Teacher: Gabriela Sued
Conceptual summary of the class
From digital cultures to algorithmic cultures. How AI prioritizes information on platforms, and how we move from information to disinformation. From the era of fake news and bots to that of deepfakes and AI. Algorithmic governance and resistance.
Class 10: AI RISKS: LEGAL INITIATIVES AND COMPARATIVE REGULATION
Teacher: Alejandro Covello
Conceptual summary of the class
Regulatory approach. AI governance. Comparative initiatives: the US and European Union models. The aggressive and defensive initiatives. The AI risk pyramid. Proposals for Argentina and the region.
Class 11: AI AS RISKY TECHNOLOGIES
Teacher: Alejandro Covello
Conceptual summary of the class
Systems approach. AI as a risk technology. Risk management in complex systems: identification and systematization of hazards, consequences, probability, severity, and frequency analysis. Mitigation measures, defenses in depth, system robustness. Security failures: accidents and incidents. AI-oriented systemic research.
Class 12: AI ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION. CASE STUDIES
Teacher: Alejandro Covello
Conceptual summary of the class
Systems approach. AI incidents and accidents. Case studies: “The xenophobic machine,” the SyRI software and the scandal over social security fraud risk assessment in the Netherlands. Also in Latin America: “Early childhood,” the case of the Salta Ministry of Health and the prevention of teenage pregnancy.
Class 13: AI IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ARTS AND CULTURE
Teacher: Wolfgang Bongers
Conceptual summary of the class
A genealogy of AI from an artistic and cultural perspective. The idea of the thinking machine and its cultural manifestations from Erewhon (Samuel Butler, 1872) to MANIAC (Benjamin Labatut, 2023). AI as a cultural technique.
Class 14: TECHNOPOETICS AND POSTHUMANIC AESTHETICS OF AI IN FILM AND LITERATURE
Teacher: Wolfgang Bongers
Conceptual summary of the class
Literary and artistic resistance to the Technocene. Appropriations of generative AI (GANs) in artistic projects. Re-evaluations of AI from the perspective of art and culture.
Class 15: THE CHALLENGES OF AI IN EDUCATION
Teacher: Mariana Ferrarelli
Conceptual summary of the class
Debates surrounding AI in education. Perspectives on Generative AI. Datafication, AI, and the platformization of education. Imaginaries about personalization through AI: debates, tensions, and underlying assumptions.
| In one payment by 19/08 | In one payment after 19/08 | Payment in 3 installments | |
| CM Pleno | $185 | $240 | USD 315 (3 x USD 105) |
| CM Associate | $185 | $240 | USD 315 (3 x USD 105) |
| No link | $310 | $370 | USD 540 (3 x USD 180) |
To participate, it is essential that you register using the online form.
Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive a confirmation in your email.
Classes will begin in August and will conclude in November 2024.
All registered participants will receive the necessary instructions to access the classes, bibliography and discussion forums through the CLACSO Virtual Training Space.
Accessing and navigating the Virtual Learning Environment is very simple and user-friendly. In any case, a technical and academic support team will always be available to you.
Exceptional Criteria: In exceptional cases, and within the first month of the start of the Advanced Diploma program, students may request to withdraw from the cohort and rejoin the following year. In all cases, the reasons for the request must be submitted in writing. After this initial period, no requests will be accepted.
Money paid will only be refunded in cases where the organizing institutions decide to cancel the activity.
Payment can be made in one installment by credit card, bank deposit, or bank transfer. We also offer the option of paying in 3 installments.
Yes. There will be discounts for students belonging to CLACSO Member Centers and CLACSO Associated Centers, for CLACSO Associate Researchers, and for all those who pay within the discount period.
Inquiries: WhatsApp: +54 9 11 3880 – 1388
Email: [email protected]
