The Critical Data Studies Cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute is delighted to host Dr Maya Indira Ganesh for her book talk on her recently published, Auto-Correct.
Auto-correct:
The fantasies and failures of AI, ethics, and the driverless car (ArtEz, 2025) offers an in-depth examination of the material, cultural, and political issues surrounding artificial intelligence, with a focus on the driverless car. The book examines the limits of ethical and moral decision-making being automated, and the implications of ‘machine ethics’, a niche yet popular approach to programming computational decision-making, for our understanding of responsibility and values in the present and future worlds with AI. Maya Indira Ganesh tracks the language, materiality, and culture of epistemic tools that establish safety and automobility as problems to be solved by the driverless car, examining outputs of AI systems versus what constitutes our social and technological presents and futures. This is not only a philosophical work but also offers insights into the future development of autonomous technologies and the ethical frameworks that will play a role in their evolution.
Auto-Correct is published by ArtEZ Press, ArtEZ University of the Arts, the Netherlands, and distributed by Ideas Books, Amsterdam. Order a copy here: https://artezpress.artez.nl/books/auto-correct/
Bio:
Dr Maya Indira Ganesh is assistant research professor at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Her book, Auto-correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car, published in March 2025, is based on doctoral work about the rhetorical, material, and epistemic leverage exerted by the ‘ethics of autonomous driving’ and its implications for governance of human social relations, spaces, and bodies alongside AI. Her research is to the social, cultural, and public adoption and value creation with AI, from streets to museums to the public sector in England. Prior to academia, Maya spent a decade as a researcher-activist working on gender justice and digital freedom of expression in the majority world.
The event will be held in Room 2.20, Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), The University of Edinburgh.
