- Watch
- Science & Technology
- 11 April 2026
Truth in the Age of Algorithms
How AI Changes What We Believe
28 January 2026
Manchester M2 1NL
Overview
In this talk, Dr Jennifer Cearns explored predictive AI as something surprisingly familiar: a modern form of divination.
Like older techniques for reading the future, today’s algorithms promise to help us navigate risk, uncertainty, and the desire to know what comes next. Dr Jennifer Cearns considered the cultural ideas built into AI, especially our long, messy history of defining “intelligence”, and how these assumptions shape what we treat as knowledge or truth.
Drawing on ethnographic research in the US and the UK, Dr Jennifer Cearns asked what kinds of truths AI seems to produce, and how these connect to much older ways of knowing that have shaped Western culture since the Enlightenment.
By viewing AI not just as a technical tool but as a cultural product, Dr Jennifer Cearns showed how predictive systems both challenge and reinforce existing assumptions about knowledge, revealing how our ideas of truth are becoming increasingly networked, iterative, optimised, and future oriented.
Dr Jennifer Cearns
Lecturer in AI at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research currently focuses on human-AI relations, affective computing and empathic AI, and how digital technologies affect personhood and identity. She has conducted ethnographic research in Brazil, Cuba, the US, Guyana, Panama, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. She is the author/editor of two books, Contraband Cultures (UCL Press, 2024) and Circulating Culture (2023, University of Florida Press), the latter of which has been nominated for the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists First Book Prize and the Society for Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize by the American Anthropological Association. Alongside her academic career, she has also worked as a professional opera singer for the past 15 years. www.jennifercearns.com