Date:
Location:
"Fool Me Twice: AI and Surveillance Capitalism’s Second Coming"
Speaker:
Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School; author, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar.
Contact:
Laura Flynn
sts@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract:
In 2023 generative AI was thrust into the consumer space, signaling a new era. Looked at another way, it also triggered a vast parade of groundhog days. Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic original sins and its progress toward totalities of knowledge and power are repeated, upscaled, and driven further into everyday life. There is a genuine path out of this house of mirrors that leads through theory and politics - comprehension, communication, and collective action. There is progress to build on. Will a new generation take up this challenge for the sake of a democratic information civilization?
Bio:
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of three books, each of which signaled the start of a new epoch in technological society. In 1988 her decade-in-the-making In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power became an instant classic that foresaw how computers would revolutionize the modern workplace. At the dawn of the twenty-first century her influential The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (with James Maxmin), written before the invention of the iPod or Uber, predicted the rise of digitally mediated personalized products and services. It warned of the individual and societal risks if companies failed to alter their adversarial and extractive digital strategies.
Professor Zuboff’s most recent book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. This work synthesizes decades of research and thinking to reveal a new economic era in which the secret massive-scale extraction and datafication of human experience is exploited for hidden processes of manufacturing, prediction, and sales. The result is an antidemocratic surveillance economy founded on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power. An international bestseller currently translated into twenty-eight languages, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has been hailed as the tech industry’s Silent Spring and praised as the Wealth of Nations and the Das Kapital of the twenty-first century.
Professor Zuboff’s most recent scholarly papers include, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy: The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization” (2022) and “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” (2015), awarded Best Publication of 2015 by the Senior Scholars Consortium of the International Conference on Information Systems. Her work has been recognizedwith the Axel Springer Award, the Global Privacy Assembly Giovanni Buttarelli Award, and the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award. Professor Zuboff has received honorary degrees from the University of Amsterdam, the Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Lucerne. She is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. In 2024-2025 she joins Mathias Risse as co-director of the Human Rights and Technology Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
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