I’m completing the project The Making of Human Mistakes in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, 1940–1990, financed by the Swedish Research Council. The project is a history of AI from the perspective of error, in three parts. The first rewrites the history of chatbots through the work of Kenneth Colby (1920–2001) and his 1970s paranoid computer program PARRY. The second argues that AI models are a type of archive that predicts the past — I pursue this by rethinking the history of backpropagation, the form of error-correction at the heart of artificial neural networks. The third revisits 1980s AI critique in the Nordics as it was expressed in the “Dialoger” project, asking which parts of that critical program remain relevant to questions concerning AI, labor, and the future of work.
In 2024–2025 I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. In 2022–2024 I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Film and Media at University of California, Berkeley. In 2018–19 I was a research affiliate at Film & Media Studies, Yale University. In the summer of 2015 I was a visitor at the IKKM center for the study of cultural techniques at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar.
My Ph.D. is in the History of Ideas (Stockholm University, 2021). I also hold a master’s in Computer Science (2013).