About the workshop

The 2020-2021 cohort of Schwartz Reisman Graduate Fellows presents Views on Techno-Utopia, a one-day, online, interdisciplinary workshop for early career scholars.

Views on Techno-Utopia will bring together early career scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to follow emerging technologies—particularly AI, platforms, and surveillance tech—through the lens of techno-utopianism. 

Techno-utopianism predicts that technologies can help us overcome human flaws and usher in a better world. What sorts of societal changes can emerging technologies actually effect? How might we tell which technologies promise more than they can deliver, or carry still-hidden risks? What forms of institutional or legal design make techno-utopianism—or critiquing its reach—possible? When faced with the detrimental effects of technological solutions to social problems, the response is often to “fix” the technology, leaving the underlying optimistic narrative untouched. How might technological “fixes” reproduce the moral systems from which they hope to save us? To what extent does the allure of the “fix” obscure techno-utopian assumptions, affect research and development, including your own?  

This workshop will be a place of interdisciplinary encounter, so presentations will strive to be accessible to people outside of their field. For instance, science-oriented scholars will consider the moral, philosophical, or social implications of their work. Analogously, humanists will ground their presentations in concrete understandings of present and future technological possibilities. 

Views on Techno-Utopia will convene discussion and feedback from peers and SRI fellows in a small workshop setting. The workshop will also be connected to SRI’s larger, main conference: Absolutely Interdisciplinary.