12.11. REPAIR Scholarly Talk by David Ribes

We invite you to the next session of the REPAIR Scholarly Talk series, featuring Professor David Ribes from the University of Washington. He will deliver a talk titled AI and the "Real World". Join us on November 12 at 15:00 at Soc & Kom, room 209 (Snellmaninkatu 12, 2nd floor). The discussants will be announced shortly. 

AI and the "Real World"

Since the 1960s, AI researchers have invoked the ‘real world’— often in quotes —as both a mystery and a target. But in AI worlds there is also something else, something beyond, above or below the 'real world', and which AI experts sometimes call 'domain independence'. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, this talk traces how this unchanging relation has persisted across the very different approaches and technologies of symbolic AI, expert systems, machine learning, and generative AI. By examining these two concepts together -- the real world and a science that seeks to be independent of it -- we can better understand how AI practitioners develop an abstract universality that is about no specific part of the 'real world', and yet somehow applicable to all of it.

David Ribes is professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE), he runs the Data Ecologies Lab (deLAB), and is the director of the Science, Technology and Society Studies (STSS) program at the University of Washington. He is a sociologist of science and technology who focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures; their relation to long-term changes in the conduct of science; and, transformations in objects of research.

His forthcoming book (2026), ‘Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures’ is a sociotechnical inspection of the concept of interoperability, tracking the trajectory of three HIV/AIDS cohort studies as they combined over three decades.