Nick Seaver – (Artificial) Intelligence
“Sticky websites are traps designed to capture people.” Artisanal traps have two faces: where hunter and prey, two entities, meet. Computers are a kind of human trap. Can we see the image of the hunter and the prey in these computer-traps in the same way as the anthropologic traps? The interface is in fact the meeting point in between worlds. Engagement is in the very structure of how our technical products work. This means that reimagining the relations between designers, coders, and users is the way to “get out of the trap”. Nick Seaver is an anthropologist of technology who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. In this talk he explores how we throughout history have created traps. We used to do it to capture animals, today we are capturing human minds through digital screens, a phenomenon called “addiction by design” and “sticky websites”.
