Machine Anthropology? The Potentials and Perils of Computational Methods in Anthropological Research

What are we, as anthropologists, going to do with artificial intelligence, and what will AI do to us? Drawing on recent developments and experiments in computational anthropology and mixed digital methods, in the first part of this talk I discuss how ethnography data can be combined with machine learning, and how this unsettles established divisions between qualitative and quantitative methods and epistemologies. In the second part, I turn to the broader question of what role anthropology might play in an emerging ”post-digital” political economy, where large language models and other forms of generative AI will reconfigure the nature of not just capital and creativity, but perhaps also agency and intelligence.