Research Seminar - Imagined pasts/imagined futures Seminar series "Alien Machines"

Imagined pasts/imagined futures Seminar series "Alien Machines"

Presented by: A/Prof Simone Natale
Discussant: Dr Adam Dodd

Date: Friday 9 October 2026
Time: 12-1pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in-person at 09-738

Abstract

Since the rise of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, entertaining a conversation with machines has become an everyday occurrence for growing masses of people around the world. One of the peculiarities of emerging forms of human-machine communication is the fact that the human users hardly know if and in what sense their interlocutor understands and listens to them. While the content of their responses can be entirely coherent and credible, the process that leads to the elaboration of such responses is opaque to many users, who are forced to make sense of the situation by assigning meanings and interpreting what is going on in the interaction. But how can communication be possible when the communicative other can never be fully accessed? In this talk, I show how discussions in biology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI anticipated some of the questions that emerged more recently with generative AI and human-machine communication. Drawing from the concept of the Umwelt, proposed by biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century, I discuss the possibility and implications of communicating with an interlocutor that is literally alien – understood through its etymological origin of alius, meaning “another, other, different.”

Bios

Simone Natale is an Associate Professor in Media Theory and History at the University of Turin, Italy, and an Editor of the journal Media, Culture & Society. He is the author of numerous publications including his monograph Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (Oxford University Press, 2021), which has been translated into Chinese, Italian, and Portuguese, and over 50 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as New Media and Society, Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Information, Communication & Society, and Communications of the ACM. He was awarded research grants by institutions including the AHRC and the ESRC in the UK, the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and the Ministry of University and Research in Italy, and has worked as expert on AI for leading international institutions and in projects such as the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) and the Brookings Institution’s Global Task Force on AI in Education.

Adam Dodd teaches communication and media studies at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Australia. He has published broadly on the cultural history and interspecies politics of microscopy, entomology and ufology, including the role that images of insects have played in shaping modern representations of extraterrestrial life. His forthcoming essay, “Close Encounters of the Hermeneutic Kind: UFOs as More-than-Human Media” will appear in UFOs in Academia: 21^st-Century Perspectives, edited by William Dewin, Daniel Wojcik and Alison Fields (Syracuse University Press, 2027).