Life from scratch - Gabriele Gramelsberger
2023-10-25 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
For more than a decade, scientists have been exploring the transition from non-living to living entities in order to create life from scratch, i.e., to move chemically from protoplasm to protocells and finally to artificial organisms. Today, synthetic biology aims to genetically engineer life from scratch, such as the synthetic Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn3.0—an artificial single-celled organism with a minimal genome consisting of 473 genes. With the use of computer-aided design (CAD) for genome editing, rapid design of new organisms is now a “one-stop-shop” business. This talk will provide a brief introduction to the history of the re-genesis of life, followed by an overview of the current practice of synthetic biology of programming life. It will conclude with some reflections on the proliferating “domain of synthetica.”
Gabriele Gramelsberger holds the Chair for Theory of Science and Technology at RWTH Aachen University and is one of the two directors of c:o/re. In 2018 she founded the Computational Social Systems Lab, supported by the NRW Digital Fellowship 2017. Her aim is to develop a conceptual framework for Philosophy of Computational Sciences as well as an open science infrastructure for Computational Science Studies. She is a member of the RWTH Human Technology Center and serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the RWTH Aachen University.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 lecture series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Robot, a Laboratory "Animal": Producing Knowledge through and about Human-Robot Interaction - Andrei Korbut
2023-11-08 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
The lecture focuses on the use of robots (primarily humanoid) in robotics laboratories to produce knowledge about human–robot interaction (HRI). Robotics is a large and diverse field, but with the recent development of artificial conversational systems and the increasing availability of human-like machines, HRI is now one of the fastest growing and most dynamic subfields in robotics. The lecture will introduce the conceptual framework for studying robots as contemporary laboratory “animals”, based on the notion of different types of lifelikeness that can be ascribed to humanoid robots. It will argue that robots, unlike other types of laboratory “living instruments”, allow for a much closer connection between tools and objects in knowledge production because they hinder the perception of them as “natural objects”.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Neuromorphic Computing: Inspiration from the Brain for Future AI Technologies - Emre Neftci
2023-11-22 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
The importance of understanding the principles of brain computation and incorporating them into artificial systems is often considered necessary to advance AI technologies. However, the recent advent of large, “Foundational” vision and language models casts doubt on this assumption, as recent AI architectures differ considerably from the brain. Yet, the human brain consumes far less energy to solve tasks similar to large AI models while demonstrating greater resilience to ambiguous cues, physical damage, and superior reasoning capabilities. This raises important questions: Can one emulate the brain’s efficiency and robustness? Will such brain-inspired solutions enhance state-of-the-art AI algorithms or will they lead to fundamentally different solutions? This lecture aims to shed light on these questions from the perspective of brain-inspired “neuromorphic computing”, explaining how current AI was shaped by neuroscience, what stands in the way of emulating the brain, and the potential benefits of taking a deeper dive into how life shaped computation.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Art's Mediation as Remediation: On Some Artworks and their reuses of Toxic Materials - Esther Leslie
2023-12-06 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
There is so much toxicity and contamination in the world. It is incontestable that vast parts of nature are poisoned, ailing or in retreat, and under threat. We live amongst poisoned materials. Drawing on the various ways in which Adorno and Benjamin addressed both the assault on nature, in the name of progress, and the possibility – or significance – of art in and after catastrophe, a number of contemporary art practices are examined in this lecture as a working through of art as a form of mediation. This mediation is multiple: between nature and culture, between world and self, between politics and aesthetics, The works and practices under examination engage directly with toxic materials, actual or evoked. In this way, the toxic materials are re-mediated, in a double sense. They are used and reused as toxic materials, but in addition, they are remediated, which is to say provide some sort of remedy or alleviation of the dire circumstances. Through such practices, the transmutational capacities of art practice are engaged, but without negating the actual hurt in the world.
Esther Leslie is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She has research interests in political theories of aesthetics and culture and the poetics of science and technology, as well as animation, in an expanded sense. She has a particular focus on thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, including Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, Kracauer and Bloch. Recent work includes a thorough and experimental history of Weimar radio and BBC exile history through the figure of Ernst Schoen.
Keynote by Dr. Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Plea for the Political Philosophy of Engineering and Technology - Carl Mitcham
2023-12-20 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
My thesis is that discussion of ethical and other issues in the philosophy of technology needs to be complemented with political philosophy. Development of the thesis takes place in three parts. Part one notes the absence of political philosophy in the first, classic European period in the philosophy of technology. Part two reviews developments in the philosophy of technology from 1970s to the 2020s, and how early efforts to think political philosophy of technology were progressively marginalized in favor of ethical, ontological, and epistemological questions. Part three looks at some nascent political philosophical discourse in current philosophy of technology that calls attention to the failure in ethics of technology to address “the problem of many hands” as well as “cultural lag” gaps between technological power, regulation, and political governance.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Towards an Ecology of Technoscience - Massimiliano Simons
2024-01-10 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
New emerging sciences and technologies – such as AI, synthetic biology, or robotics – are too often discussed in isolation. As a result, little attention is paid to the potential commonalities and ways in which they can inform each other. In this talk, I want to focus on aspect of what many of these technosciences have in common: attempts to harness the self-organization of systems in order to design new technological artifacts. This involves a certain loss of control: the scientists do not have full control over the outcome, but grant the system under study a certain autonomy.
The most obvious case of this is machine learning in data science, where a problem – often in the form of discriminating between data – is solved not by rational design, but by letting a self-learning algorithm find patterns for us. While this can be effective, it also leads to the problem of opacity: the process by which the problem was solved often remains a black box, with all the risks that implies. In this talk, I will argue that this problem is not unique to data science, but is also at work in other sciences. I will focus on the life sciences, and in particular the method of directed evolution in synthetic biology, which follows similar lines: solving a set of problems – how to design specific molecules or enzymes – not by rational design, but by creating a context in which natural selection solves the problem for us.
The goal of this talk is to work toward a more general framework for how and why the technosciences can be characterized by this fascination with self-organization and loss of control.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Flowers for Agouti: Epigenetics and the Genealogy of Uplift - Ben Woodard
2024-01-24 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
The notion of uplift has a science-fictional and social justice connotation: it is the raising up of one species by another as well as a historical (and often racially codified) way of speaking of how one group raises itself up above limiting structural conditions. While these notions seem disparate they in fact have a shared history that hybridizes fictional and non-fictional aspirations for future humanity as well as the origins of civilization as such.
This talk examines how recent discussions of epigenetics complicates notions of a too hasty equation of cognition and agency both within humanity and across species that the concept of uplift as championed as an anti-Darwinian politics of Eurocentric teleology.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Bio-inspired Materials and Dreams of Inspiration - Michael Friedman
2024-02-07 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Helsinki) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
Materials are found at the very center of our life, situated in the complex zone between nature and society. In the recent decades, new discoveries in the natural sciences and in the materials sciences have enabled to develop new materials, so called ‘active materials’ and ‘Bio-inspired Materials’. These new materials are considered as entities that are able to ‘sense’ and respond to their environment. Furthermore they are not only associated with a technical claim, but also with the hope that they can do ‘more with less’, i.e. perform complex tasks, but use fewer resources and produce less waste to do so. Such materials are considered new ‘ideal’ materials, but they are materials that cannot be taken as such from nature as they have to be constructed in engineered in a sophisticated way. Nevertheless, the model for these manufactured active materials is often organic materials found in nature, such as the grown wood of trees and the bone formation in living organisms – and in this sense the scientists are ‘inspired’ by nature. The scientific analysis of these organic materials may lead to the fabrication of synthetic and bio-inspired active materials, and this in turn raises the question – which I will discuss in my talk – whether the dream of inspiration from nature is not a revision of a much older view, or rather metaphor, to read and finally write the ‘book’ of nature.
This event is part of our winter semester 2023/24 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
To take part either online or in presence, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Distilled, Extruded, Suspended: Lessons in Lifelikeness from the Metabolism of Mass Production - Hannah Landecker
2024-04-23 17:30 - 19:00 (Europe/Berlin) | RWTH Aachen University – Super C – Generali Saal 639, Templergraben 57, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Keynote “Politics of the Machines” Conference
Abstract:
This talk is about quite ordinary matters, such as the prevention of perishability in rubbers and oils, and how one makes a non-dairy creamer that lasts without refrigeration. Yet these are also extraordinary matters. The harvesting and remobilization of metabolically powerful objects and processes proceeded apace in the twentieth century, a process of industrialization not just of agriculture or craft production, but of metabolism itself. Cells, enzymes, antioxidant molecules, polymers, fats and many other capacities and pieces of living things were pulled apart and then pieced back together, re-articulated into new sequences of material transformation at augmented volume or manipulated speed, sometimes suspended here, or driven forward there. Three lessons in lifelikeness from the historical annals of enzymes and antioxidants will invite listeners into the maw of a vast and reticulate petro-animate metabolism, where novelty concatenates with mimicry and the synthetic is fed to the natural for dinner. Today, as we begin to ask whether our material things are lasting too long – or not long enough – and the technical parameters of planetary costs of consumption figure prominently in negotiations of ageing, biodegradability and toxicity, it is useful to engage directly with the history and future of these technical lifespan objects into which values and temporalities are built.
This event is part of our summer semester 2024 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Lifestyle Transitions in Human Microbiome Research: A View from History and Philosophy of Science - Abigail Nieves
2024-05-08 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
This event is part of our summer semester 2024 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

On the Origin and Development of Scientific Concepts: Light Rays and Lines of Force - Friedrich Steinle
2024-05-22 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
In studying the historical dynamics of scientific knowledge, concepts constitute central objects. Their study, however, poses difficulties and challenges that have to do with their specific character as basic components of scientific thought: Much as in everyday life, they are constantly used but scarcely addressed as such. While we speak about chairs, cats and cauliflower, or about temperature, bacteria, and oxygen, we rarely put those concepts themselves in question. At the same time, processes of their formation and development are shaped by a bewildering variety of factors, including wider cultural aspects. Historical studies help us understanding both the complexity of scientific concept formation and its implications, i.e. the historical baggage of scientific concepts. In my talk, I shall discuss those features and illustrate them by two cases from the history of physical sciences: light rays and lines of force.
This event is part of our summer semester 2024 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Life-Like Artificial Music: Understanding the Impact of AI on Musical Thinking - Nikita Braguinski
2024-06-05 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
This lecture explores the impact of machine learning on the future of music research and theory. It argues that AI-generated music poses a deep challenge for existing theories: AI systems can learn to imitate musical styles without receiving any information about human music theory concepts, raising questions about the validity of those concepts. Additionally, music-generating AI systems can be trained on audio directly, bypassing notation, while human music theory almost always works with notation as a simplified and abstracted proxy.
As an example of the conceptual challenges and shifts that now arise in music research, the talk examines a recent paper that compares Western music theory concepts with structures that emerge in a machine learning model trained on musical notation. While the paper finds similarities between the two, the talk argues that the machine learning system’s output is still influenced by human biases and choices in the training data and model architecture – and that this influence may in fact be unavoidable.
Finally, the talk argues that while AI may be able to generate novel structures for analyzing music, their applicability to human music theory and practice may prove to be extremely limited due to the differences between human cognition and machine learning. Overall, the talk raises questions about the future potential for AI to disrupt human theory-making – and not only in the discipline of musicology.
No knowledge of musicological concepts is required for understanding the presentation and participating in the discussion.
This event is part of our summer semester 2024 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.
Dr. Nikita Braguinski is a 2023-2024 Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Cultures of Research” at RWTH Aachen University. In his work he currently concentrates on the possible impact of machine learning and big online listening datasets on the future of music research. His book “Mathematical Music. From Antiquity to Music AI” (Routledge, 2022) was translated into Korean, receiving the Sejong book prize in 2023. He was a Fellow at Harvard University, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2023, he co-convened, together with Eamonn Bell and Miriam Akkermann, the ZiF Bielefeld Visiting Research Group “The Future of Musical Knowledge in the Age of Machine Learning”.

Indoor Atmospheres: Comfort, Aerial Hygiene and the Microbiome of the Built Environment - Sven Opitz
2024-06-19 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany

Organising Life: Biocuration, Bio-Ontologies, and the Conditions of Academic Work - Sarah Davies
2024-07-03 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin) | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
In this talk I discuss biocuration as a field of scholarly practice. In creating and managing data and knowledge bases, biocuration is essential to research in the biosciences, but the skilled human labour it involves is often rendered invisible to its users. At the same time, this ordering work is central to rendering scientific knowledge thinkable. I therefore reflect on what biocuration tells us about the intersections of knowledge production with digital tools and the material conditions of academic work. What practices constitute knowledge, and how are these rendered visible and valuable (or not) within academic systems?
This event is part of our summer semester 2024 Lecture Series Lifelikeness.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Towards Expanded STS? - Stefan Böschen
2024-10-09 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)
This event is part of our winter semester 2024/25 Lecture Series Expanding Science and Technology Studies.
To take part either online or in presence, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

An IAEA for AI? The Regulation of Artificial Intelligence and Governance Models from the Nuclear Age - Elisabeth Röhrlich
2024-10-30 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)

STS between the Climate Crisis and the Einstein Telescope - Harro van Lente
2024-11-13 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)

Cancelled: From IP and Cookies to IDFA/GAID. Towards a Historical Sociology of (Digital) Addressing - Ricky Wichum
2024-11-27 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)
Unfortunately, this lecture has been canceled due to health reasons. We will continue our lecture series on December 18. Thank you for your understanding.
This event is part of our winter semester 2024/25 Lecture Series Expanding Science and Technology Studies.
To take part either online or in presence, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Spaces of Research Beyond the Laboratory? The University as a Neglected Research Object in STS - David Kaldewey
2024-12-18 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)

Communicating Science and Technology. How Can STS Benefit From Historical Semantics? - Désirée Schauz
2025-01-08 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)

What Role for History and Philosophy of Science in STS? Critical Engagements with Empirical Inquiry - Sabina Leonelli
2025-01-21 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin)
