ABSTRACT  

AI-powered digital flight assistants (DFA)— a high-tech version of Amazon Alexa or Google Home—are increasingly discussed as one of the innovations necessary to propel aviation towards autonomous flights. But what should they do, and how should they interact with pilots? Based on co-design, participatory, and ethnographic research, this paper describes how AI assistants were imagined and evaluated by airplane pilots. The paper proposes the concept of Value Binding to describe how pilots, in their imagination of the future, limited and curtailed the scope of digital flight assistants – embedding them into their current preoccupations and their present labour conditions. 

SPEAKER DETAILS

Fabio Mattioli is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the University of Melbourne. He has written extensively on the politics of financial expansion and innovative technologies in Macedonia and Australia. His book, Dark Finance (Stanford UP, 2020), won the Ed A Hewett Book Prize for outstanding monograph on the political economy of Eastern Europe and the Honorable mention for the William Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology.   

Currently, Fabio is leading a study on the political economy of Artificial Intelligence in aviation which looks at the social complexities of introducing digital flight assistants. His other lines of research involve ethnographic approaches to “fake news,” startups, co-design, and AI in winemaking.   

 Before joining the University of Melbourne, Fabio taught at John Jay College and New York University. He obtained Ba from the Universita di Firenze (IT), a Master’s degree from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and Sciences Sociales (FR) and a PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (US). 

ADDITIONAL DETAILS  

Our speaker will be presenting in-person at Deakin Waterfront: AD1.122 in the Sally Walker building or you can join us via Zoom:  

https://deakin.zoom.us/j/84436200390?pwd=VjRHUVZseTMvYWcrSFFJbU1LRDcrUT09  

Meeting ID: 844 3620 0390 | please email ciara.barker@deakin.edu.au for the password.