Draft:Hamid Ekbia

Hamid Reza Ekbia, born on 23 August 1955, is an Iran-born American university professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs known for his work on political economy of computing and the concept of heteromation.

Ekbia has published widely and is the author of such books as Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism (2017) and Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence (2008).

Ekbia’s research is in the political economy of computing, the future of work and labor around the globe, and in how technologies mediate cultural, socio-economic, and geopolitical relations of modern societies. He believes that computing and capitalism have been developing in a lockstep fashion, which has led, among others, to the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks.

Biography
Born on 23 August 1955 in Mashhad, the capital city of Khorasan - an ancient province of Iran and the birthplace of great poets Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, and Akhavan Sales.

He studied engineering at Abadan Institute of Technology in Iran and University of California, Los Angeles in the U.S., and, later, Computer Science and Cognitive Science in Indiana University, where he became a fargonaut at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. After teaching at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and the University of Redlands, he became professor of informatics, cognitive science, and international studies at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at the Indiana University Bloomington and director of the Center for Research on Mediated Interaction. In 2022 Ekbia became University Professor in Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and director of its Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI).

Political economy of computing
Ekbia has introduced and is developing a new area of study, which he refers to as the “political economy of computing”. He approaches it as a dynamic relationship between computing and the capitalist economy. He envisions the study of the interactions between computing and the economy as a recursive process that would start at the macro scale of the social and historical (world-economies, nation-states, law, trade, infrastructures, crisis, etc.), move to the meso level of the institutional and organizational (firms, markets, platforms, innovation, jobs, automation, etc.) and finally zoom in on the micro level of the personal and psychological (affect, attention, labor, value, privacy, etc.).

Heteromation
Ekbia, together with Bonnie A. Nardi, introduced the term “heteromation” to grasp the practice of extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks. Heteromation is the third stage in the process of division of labor between humans and machines, following automation and augmentation.

Artificial intelligence
Ekbia studies artificial intelligence (AI) from a socio-philosophical perspective. According to him, a great deal of confusion has currently been created through the use of “AI” as an umbrella term for a set of related technologies that are sold to the public as snake oil. The confusion, in turn, gives rise to policies and practices pursued by various social institutions (governments, businesses, media, judiciary bodies, funding agencies, etc.) the outcomes of which feed back into the underlying misconceptions about AI, generating even more confusion — a vicious cycle that seems to reproduce itself without end and without a driving vision on the horizon, let alone taking responsibility for it. The current fever about AI, which fuels these policies and practices, is symptomatic of a paradoxical situation where, on the one hand, technological innovations that, in the words of Edmund Husserl, “we can never cease to admire,” allow us to tackle a wide range of health, medical, and environmental problems in a novel fashion, while, on the other hand, feeling helpless in the face of mounting economic, cultural, political, and environmental crises that seem to be spiraling out of control. It is in this sense that the crisis of AI expresses these other crises. AI does not cause these crises, nor is it a simple side effect of them; rather, it is their vivid embodiment, capturing and manifesting their coupled dynamics, their regenerative character, and their imposing logic.

Technology and development
Ekbia studies global development and the North-South geo-politics, largely from a scientific and technological perspective. He argues that technology and development have a close connection with each other. In the Western imagination, technology is often tied to modernization, progress, and social good. In modern times, various technologies (from mechanical harvesters to baby bottles and from radio sets to social media) have been introduced to the developing world with a promise of progress. The outcomes, however, have been mixed at best, with such interventions often disrupting established ways of life, replacing them with alternatives that have a fallen-from-sky feel to them.

Books

 * Ekbia, H. and Nardi, B. Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism (MIT, 2017)
 * Ekbia, H. Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence (CUP, 2008).
 * Sugimoto, C., Ekbia, H., Mattioli, M. (eds) Big Data is Not a Monolith (MIT, 2016).

Selected papers

 * Ekbia, H. and B. Nardi. (2019). Keynes’ Grandchildren and Marx’s Gig Workers: Why Human Labor Still Matters. International Labor Review, 158 (4).
 * Ekbia, H. (2018). The Tyranny of the Alter-Sphere. Figurationen. No. 1/2018. pp. 71-88.
 * Ekbia, H. and Nardi, B. (2018). Automation and Algorithms: From Form to Content. Cultural Anthropology33(3): 360-367.
 * Nardi, B. and Ekbia, H. (2018). The Future of Human Labor: The Case of War and Manufacturing. SIGCAS: Computer and Society Newsletter. http://www.sigcas.org/newsletter/volume-47-issue-4/7.pdf
 * Blyth, P.L., Mladenovic, M., Nardi, B.A., Ekbia, H.R., and Su, N.M. (2016). Distributing Benefits and Burdens: Expanding the Design Horizon for Self-Driving Vehicles. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
 * Ekbia, H. (2016). Digital Inclusion and Social Exclusion: The Political Economy of Value in a Networked World. The Information Society, 32 (2): 165-175.
 * Qaurooni, D. & Ekbia, H. (2016). The Enhanced Warrior: Drone Warfare and the Problematics of Separation. Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.
 * Ekbia, H. & Nardi, B. (2015). The Political Economy of Computing: The Elephant in the HCI Room. Interactions, pp. 46-49, Nov.-Dec.
 * Ekbia, H., Matiolli, M., Kouper, I., Arave, G., Ghazinejad, A. Bowman, T., Suri, R., Tsou, A., Weingart, S., & Sugimoto, C. (2015). Big Data, Bigger Dilemmas: A Critical Review. Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 66(8) 1523-1746.
 * Suri, V.R. & Ekbia, H. (2015). Spatial Mediations in Historical Understanding: GIS and the Evolving Epistemic Practices of History. Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology. DOI: 10.1002/asi
 * Ekbia, H., Lee, J. & Wiley, S. (2014). Rehab Games As Components Of Workflow: A Case Study. Games for Health Journal, 3(4): 215–226.
 * Ekbia, H. & Nardi, B. (2014). Heteromation And Its (Dis)Contents: The Division of Labor Between Humans And Machines. First Monday: 19(6).
 * Ekbia, H. & Sawhney, H. (2014). Reason, Resistance, and Reversal: Metaphors Of Technology In Design and Law. Culture, Theory, and Critique, 56(2): 149-169.DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2014.904752
 * Jozkowski, K. and Ekbia, H. (2015). Campus Craft: A Game For Sexual Assault Prevention In Universities. Games for Health Journal, 4(2): 95-106.
 * Ekbia, H. & Suri, V.R. (2013). Of Dustbowl Ballads And Railroad Tables: Erudite Enactments In Historical Inquiry. Information & Culture. 48(2): 260-278.
 * Day, R. & Ekbia, H. (2010). Digital Experiences. In Kallinikos, J., Lanzara, G. F. and Nardi, B.(Ed.). The digital habitat — Rethinking experience and social practice. First Monday,Volume 15, Number 6 - 7.
 * Ekbia, H. (2010). Fifty Years Of Research In Artificial Intelligence. In: Cronin, B. (Ed.) Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 44. Medford, NJ: Information Today/American Society for Information Science and Technology, pp. 201-242.
 * Ekbia, H. (2009). Digital Artifacts As Quasi-Objects: Qualification, Mediation, And Materiality. Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12), 2554-2566.
 * Ekbia, H., & Evans, T. (2009). Regimes Of Information: Land Use, Management, And Policy. The Information Society, 25, 328-343.
 * Ekbia, H., & Hara, N. (2008). Quality Of Evidence In Knowledge Management Research: Scholarly And Practitioner Literature. Journal of Information Science, 34, 110-126.
 * Leuteritz, T., & Ekbia, H. (2008). Not All Roads Lead To Resilience: A Complex Systems Approach To The Study Of Three Habitats. Ecology and Society, 13(1), (1). [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss1/art1/
 * Ekbia, H., & Kling, R. (2005). Network Organizations: Voluntary Cooperation Or Multivalent Negotiation.The Information Society, 21(3), 155–168.
 * Ekbia, H. (2004). How IT Mediates Organizations: Enron And the California Energy Crisis. Journal of Digital Information,5(4). Available from: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i04/Ekbia/