Human Life in the Age of Algorithms
The extraordinarily rapid rise of algorithmic technologies is witnessing a seismic shift in how the lives of humans are interwoven with novel machine paradigms of knowledge and action. Across many spheres of life – from decisions on welfare or immigration to judgements about healthcare – the futures of people and societies are becoming intimately connected to the patterns and attributes that algorithms have learned from data. The Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life (CAL) is transforming how we understand and study the relationship between human life and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Algorithmic life involves an emerging cultural, social, and technological way of knowing and engaging with the world, a paradigm whose form and consequences are not yet well understood.
The Centre is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of algorithmic life, pursuing one of the most urgent questions for contemporary society: how do we wish to live with and alongside algorithmic technologies? Our researchers are examining the novel paradigms of knowledge, perception, and action that emerge with contemporary algorithmic technologies. They are exploring how ideas and concepts of what it means to be human transform and adapt in collaboration with the different life-worlds of algorithms.
Our four Thematic Programmes are vertical slices through the overall field of algorithmic life, and they provide the primary engine for fundamental research: generativity, image and language, synthetic worlds, and being human.
The four CAL clusters provide the cross-cutting relays across the Centre’s research, focusing on difficult problems that are present across the scholarly field of algorithmic life and in a broader society: decisions, data, publics, and forms of life.
Each thematic programme is co-convened by two Durham researchers, whilst clusters are led by our national and international partners. CAL is truly interdisciplinary with members from across all faculties and disciplines.
