Abstract

Artificial Intelligence is an increasingly important part of our lives.  Our phones, apps, cars, smartwatches, wearables, computers, TVs, cameras, and even fridges are embedded with personal assistants that leverage AI to make our lives easier. In exchange, AI-powered assistants capture our data, providing tech companies with novel ways to predict and affect our behaviors – a process that critical scholars have increasingly theorized as a surveillance-oriented form of digital capitalism.

The case of Artificial Intelligence in aviation, however, offers a different view of AI and, more broadly, digital capitalism. Despite being at the forefront of automation, characterized by high labour costs, and low returns on financial investments, aviation has not seen a proliferation of AI systems. To explain this conundrum, the lecture explores the multiple values that Aviotech companies and pilots associate with AI. Exploring the socio-economic conjuncture that has stalled the development of AI in the sector offers new opportunities to re-theorize digital capitalism, but also to re-design AI systems built around workers.

Bio

Fabio Mattioli is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the University of Melbourne. He has written extensively on the politics of financial expansion and innovative technologies in Macedonia and Australia. His book, Dark Finance (Stanford UP, 2020), won the Ed A Hewett Book Prize for outstanding monograph on the political economy of Eastern Europe and the Honorable mention for the William Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology. Currently, Fabio is leading a study on the political economy of Artificial Intelligence in aviation which looks at the cultural complexities of introducing digital flight assistants. He obtained a Master's degree from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and Sciences Sociales and a PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.