The Mundania Files

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Welcome to The Mundania Files, an experimental course and a proposal to imagine differently about emerging technologies and the everyday. To better understand the transformative power of technologies such as AI over time, we need to know more how emerging technologies are incessantly and gradually enmeshed in everyday life. We need to scrutinize what we normally ignore, and to challenge how we imagine novel as well as earlier technologies. The Mundania Files will offer new approaches to understand the role of emerging and transformative technologies, and how they move from buzz, hype and matters of concern to a faint often unnoticed background hum. The course can be seen as a creative sandbox where you will find fuel for thought, and inspiration to imagine differently about the futures of AI, emerging technologies and everyday life. Our conceptual anchor in this will be ideas about Mundania. We will start with the small and the seemingly trivial, but also with unexpected examples, to examine how technologies gradually become ordinary. We will also approach larger issues with the aim to circumvent simplistic pro-con positions and prevailing assumptions about the futures of AI. Positions and assumption often strongly influenced by the buzz and hype surrounding the most recent applications and variations of broader and fuzzier concepts such as AI. We will play with ideas about Mundania, but you will also be encouraged to pose new questions and to analyse the futures of technologies from your own specific horizon. All in all, the aim is to energize how to imagine AI and everyday life, as well as to think critically and constructively about these matters.