How can governance of technology support the flourishing of democracy? Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping our world. Powerful prediction tools are changing how decisions are made in key legal, medical, and consumer spheres, narrowing opportunities for the exercise of judgment, empathy, and creativity. How, then, are we to put democracy at the heart of AI governance?

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? In this event, eminent political theorist Wendy Brown will place nihilism at the centre of these predicaments. Nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. How, then, are we to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility?

In this conversation with Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting, Regan Penaluna will discuss the women philosophers who rekindled her love of philosophy and awakened her feminist consciousness, including Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft, outlining an alternative history of philosophy as well as how these thinkers aided her in her own search for love and truth.