Date/Time
Tuesday
2 Dec 2025
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Location
The Commonwealth Club of California
110 The Embarcadero
Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium
San Francisco, CA 94105
Nina Beguš is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Focusing on language and literature, her work foregrounds our imaginary around AI. She will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club, along with speculative fiction writer James Yu and science fiction writer Ted Chiang. For more information about the event and to purchase tickets, please visit The Commonwealth Club World Affairs website.
Artificial Humanities explores how the humanities—literature, history, and art—can deepen our understanding of artificial intelligence and its development. By examining fictional representations of AI in parallel with actual technological developments, Nina Beguš presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for understanding the cultural, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of AI. She traces connections from Eliza Doolittle to ELIZA the chatbot and current language models, incorporates Slavic fictional examples from the Pygmalion paradigm, and compares mid-century science fiction and recent Hollywood films with contemporary developments in social robotics and virtual beings.
