Fellow 2022-2023 TERESA HEFFERNAN
Term: 10/2022 – 05/2023
Acting Chair and Professor of English Language and Literature, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS
Selected Fellowships and Awards
2021-2023 "AI everywhere": The Mythical and Religious Roots of Algorithmic Faith
2019-2020 Fellowship at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
2013-2019 SSHRC Insight Grant: “Where Science Meets Fictions: Social Robots and the Ethical Imagination”
2008-2011 SSHRC Standard Research Grant: “Travelling East”
2007 King’s College London Library and Archives Visiting Fellowship
Selected Publications
Books
2019 Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Edited. Palgrave/MacMillan.
2016 Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity and the Spectres of Orientalism. University of Toronto Press.
2008/2012 Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. University of Toronto Press.
2012 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters. Broadview Press. Editor (with Daniel O’Quinn).
Special Journal Issues, Guest Editor
2003 Co-editor (with Jill Didur). “Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Empire” for Cultural Studies 17.1
2003 Co-editor (with Jill Didur and Bart Simon). “Critical Posthumanism” for Cultural Critique 53.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW TERESA HEFFERNAN
Artificial Intelligence and the (Post)Apocalyptic Imaginary
In keeping with traditional apocalyptic narratives, the prophets of AI have announced the impending birth of a “superintelligence” that has the potential to either destroy and/or renew the world. Yet AI as an existential risk has not only distracted us from the catastrophic reality of environmental devastation, species decline, and climate change, but has contributed to it. The “new oil,” as it is often called in reference to its lucrative potential, mimics the resource-intensive and climate altering infrastructure of oil and automobiles. While Google head Sundar Pichai plans to have “AI everywhere” and an “AI-first world,” this project challenges some of the founding assumptions driving this push for the omnipresence of artificial intelligence. It proposes that techno-utopianism/dystopianism is rooted in religion, fiction, and myth; and that the concomitant faith in algorithms effaces the differences between the organic and synthetic and language and code. Resisting the mystical and apocalyptic rhetoric of AI, I argue that it is important to restore the materiality/reality of machines: from conflict minerals to built-in obsolescence to water demands for servers to e-waste to the automation of race, gender, and class biases to the invasion of privacy and theft of data to the erosion of democratic institutions and the public sphere to the implementation of platform capitalism and the uberisation of work.