• Events

Sarah T. Roberts (University of California – Los Angeles, USA): The Hydra, or: The Social Meaning of Artificial Intelligence

• Date: 25. November 2026
• Time: 18:30
• Street: Domshof 26, 28195 Bremen (Universität Bremen)
• Location: Forum im Domshof
• Room: Kassenhalle

Abstract

In this talk, I describe and contextualize so-called “AI” by addressing, then quickly moving on from, its origins, technological underpinnings and specificities and turn to its deployment and rhetorical social and political dimensions and functions. For that, I introduce the metaphor of “the hydra” (from the mythical Hydra of Lerna), a multi-faceted beast whose head regrew as soon as another was severed from its body, always showing a different face and a seemingly indefatigable shapshifter. I argue that, within capitalism, the primary objective of AI consists in progressively reducing labor costs toward zero, using automation as its main instrument, a playbook drawn from the shift in many Western countries from industrial to post-industrial societies (Braverman, 1975). The rhetprical goal of AI, or at least its political and economic value, is less its ability to create facsimiles of creative human cognitive activities and much more so in its role in devaluing those very activities — creating a recursive and tautological circumstance making the case for devaluation of self-expression while reinforcing it with atomized, lesser outputs. Echoing the late Mark Fisher, I ask if there is no alternative and work out in real time, with engagement from those assembled, where we might collectively find sites of resistance and collective action under this regime.

Bio

Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.