Philosopher of technology Yuk Hui introduces ideas from his new book developing political thought to address today's planetary crises.

Yuk Hui, professor of philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, returns to Birkbeck to speak about the ideas developed in his soon to be published book Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). 

What is "planetary thinking" today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms "megamachines." The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future.

Hui is author of Art and Cosmotechnics, Recursivity and Contingency, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, and On the Existence of Digital Objects.

This event is sponsored by the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology and the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN).

Contact name: Joel Mckim

Speakers

• Yuk Hui - Yuk Hui is Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions. Hui studied computer engineering at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a PhD thesis under Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths University London, and obtained his Habilitation in philosophy from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Hui is author of several monographs that have been translated into a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China:-An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016), Recursivity and Contingency ( 2019), and Art and Cosmotechnics (2021). Hui is co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015) and editor of Philosophy after Automation (Philosophy Today, Vol.65. No.2, 2021), Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction (2024) among others.