“Feeling Like a State: China, America, and Control in the Age of AI,” Silvia Lindtner

Silvia will present findings from her book-in-progress, "Feeling Like a State: China, America, and Control in the Age of AI," to theorize a global regime of control that is emerging alongside contemporary AI. While AI is often understood as an instrument of vision and feared as all-seeing, she will show that contemporary control operates via affect—the production, circulation, and management of feelings. She will show what might seem at first counterintuitive: governance is relying simultaneously on more coercive and on more participatory measures; a simultaneous tightening of control and the increase in citizen participation. Contrary to political rhetoric that frames China as a dangerous “other,” she shows that America’s and China’s approaches to AI have much in common; both the Chinese and American state variously operationalize AI via affect. To illustrate, this talk will draw from long-term ethnographic research, with a particular focus on the use of AI in population management during China's zero Covid and efforts to revitalize the countryside.

Silvia Margot Lindtner is a writer and ethnographer. She is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner is a current Visiting Scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at the Yale Law School. She is the author of the award-winning book "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation" (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of the multigraph "Technoprecarious" (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020). Lindtner has been a Visiting Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai (2021-2024), a CUSP (China-US Scholars Program) Fellow (2021-22), and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program (2021-23). Lindtner’s research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IIE (the Institute of International Education), IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), Intel Labs, among others.