This Is Not a Talk About AI (It's About Fire, Anthropology, Technology and Humanity

Name: This Is *Not* a Talk About AI (It's About Fire, Anthropology, Technology and Humanity
Start: 2026-10-01T17:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-10-01T19:00:00-07:00
Location: Kiln: 1120 SE Madison St, 1120 SE Madison S OR

📅 Thursday, October 1, 2026 @ 5:00 PM until 7:00 PM 📍 Kiln: 1120 SE Madison St, 1120 SE Madison S OR 👁 1 view

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When AI begins to feel uncanny, dangerous, or too powerful to contain, our cultural imagination reaches quickly for Frankenstein. The comparison is everywhere in the current news cycle: a creation escapes its maker, technology accelerates beyond human control, and the world discovers too late that it has built something it cannot govern. The fear is not foolish. AI is moving rapidly into the systems that shape work, education, media, public services, and democratic life. But Frankenstein offers a more interesting warning than the one we usually tell. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel was shaped by fascination with galvanism, the early electrical experiments that made dead muscle appear to twitch. Its central horror is not simply that Victor Frankenstein creates something powerful. It is that he creates it and then abandons responsibility for what follows. In This Is Not a Talk About AI, digital anthropologist Ali Maaxa, Ph.D. asks what changes when we stop treating AI as an alien force with a destiny of its own and start recognizing it as a human-built infrastructure. A system does not simply “take over.” It receives power through human decisions: whose data it uses, who funds it, what it is allowed to access, which institutions treat its outputs as legitimate, whose labor maintains it, and whether people can challenge its decisions. The story begins long before AI. Neanderthals made birch-bark tar with controlled fire to bind stone tools to handles and hunting shafts. The Gutenberg Bible made authoritative texts reproducible at unprecedented scale and turned interpretation into a public struggle. Electricity extended the human day and television reorganized public attention. The internet promised open connection before becoming an infrastructure of platforms, surveillance, ranking, and concentrated control. Each technology changed not only what people could do, but what became normal. Each produced new anxieties, new gatekeepers, new forms of dependence,

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