ÇEM JİYANÊ NEXŞ DİKİN
To AI or not to AI (no, it is not too late) – A Small Set of Provocations for Creative Minds
Workshop
28. November 2026
14.00-17.00
14.00-17.00
Save the Date
For adults
in English
We are living through a moment of “AI-fication,” in which artificial intelligence seems to be required everywhere, for everything, all the time. The result is an overwhelming, manufactured sense of urgency in sectors such as art, film, and video, and with it the impression that AI is both unavoidable and beyond question. This two-part workshop in the series What on Earth..? steps back from that urgency to look first at what AI actually is and then at the power structures behind it.
Register here
Part One
What Is AI?
Demystifying Machine Learning and Automated Systems
Artificial intelligence has become an umbrella term for everything from spam filters to chatbots to facial recognition systems. This conceptual fog is itself a political problem, because it obscures who makes decisions and who bears responsibility. The first part of the workshop strips away the hype and builds a shared working vocabulary, paying particular attention to the gap between how AI is marketed and what it can actually do.
Part Two
The AI Ecosystem:
Power, Ownership, and the Political Economy of Advanced Technologies
The second part maps the players and dependencies of the AI economy, from Big Tech and the computing oligopoly to states, militaries, and the expanding AI-industrial complex. It also situates current geopolitics within this context, looking at how places and people are turned into markets, testing grounds, and sources of labor and data. Anyone engaging with so-called emerging digital technologies needs to understand this political economy, because its serious long-term consequences are not accidents of code but the result of business models and power imbalances.
Workshop led by Marek Tuszynski (Tactical Tech)
What on Earth..? is a collaboration between Spore Initiative and Tactical Tech in partnership with the Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy at the University of Washington.
