Artificial Intimacies: Figuring Care in the Age of AI - jessie beier ONLINE TALK
On October 21, Learning Machines Project PI, jessie beier, joined the Care Research Lab (University of Cologne / University of Education Karlsruhe) to give an online lecture titled Artificial Intimacies: Figuring Care in the Age of AI.
The talk asked: What happens when machines are trained to care? Moving from mood-tracking wellness platforms and therapeutic chatbots to classroom emotion-recognition software and AI “partners,” beier explores how so-called “feeling machines” promise support and attentiveness while simultaneously standardizing intimacy, flattening sensation, and hardwiring normative models of emotion and subjectivity. Situating these systems within precarious care infrastructures and the extractive circuits of data, energy, and hidden labour that sustain them, the lecture probes how care becomes protocol, how affective labour is black-boxed into computational logics, and where openings remain for refusal, ambivalence, and collective forms of resistant care with and beyond the machine.
