Emily M. Bender: Katz Distinguished Lecture

Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities
Date: February 10, 2026 at 6:30 PM
Location: UW Kane Hall 210
Kane Hall, 4069 Spokane Ln, Seattle, WA 98195.
Free & Open to the Public. Seats open until filled.
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The production and promotion of so-called "AI" technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience, while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as "ground truth" even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human.
Emily M. Bender is the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in Linguistics at the University of Washington and an Adjunct Professor in the Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2022), on TIME Magazine's inaugural TIME100AI (2023), and co-author (with Dr. Alex Hanna) of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper, 2025).
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