Caio Augusto Martins Simoneti cam248@cam.ac.uk
Brazil
Politics and International Studies, Trinity Hall College
PhD thesis: Ghost in the Machine: Artificial Intelligence and the Shadow of the Modern Subject
Research interests:
1. The political subject
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Poststructuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory
4. Popular culture
My PhD focuses on how discourses on artificial intelligence and its political consequences are marked by categories and ideas that are associated with the conception of the modern subject, as well as how these technologies allow for alternative understandings of political subjectivity. I am particularly interested in the way hopes and fears around AI mobilise notions such as autonomy, rationality and progress, which have been profoundly connected to certain understandings of the political subject that emerged with modern thought. In exploring these relations and ideas, I plan to address how the impact of such notions on discourses on AI might reproduce inequalities associated with gender, race and colonialism.
Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?
I was inspired to pursue these interests by the support and the work of many lecturers with whom I had contact throughout my academic trajectory, especially by Dr. Natália Maria Félix de Souza from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, who first introduced me to the problematics of the politics of subjectivity, gender and postcolonial studies. I was also generally inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary authors such as Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway.