Johan Fredrikzon

Johan Fredrikzon (M.Sc. Computer Science, Ph.D. History of Ideas), is a researcher in the History of technology and media. As of fall 2022 he is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. His current project, The Making of Human Mistakes in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, 1940–1990 (financed by the Swedish Research Council) is a history of AI from the perspective of errors and mistakes. This work investigates how the notion of what constitutes a mistake has influenced what has counted as intelligence in humans and machines, respectively.

Fredrikzon's most recent publication is an attempt to define a new research field – erasure studies – by providing scholars from many disciplines with a theoretical framework with which to engage in problems concerning how objects such as files, texts, and photographs but also identities, data, buildings, and memories are made to disappear from the world. "Towards erasure studies: Excavating the material conditions of memory and forgetting" in Memory, Mind & Media (co-authored with Chris Haffenden).

As of May 2023, Fredrikzon is under contract with the leading Nordic publisher Fri Tanke to write a history of the ideas of artificial intelligence (AI). The aim is to produce an accessible account of how thinking in AI has devleoped that stays clear of the current hype without getting stuck in doomsday scenarios.

During the spring of 2023, Fredrikzon has taken active part in the public discourse on AI from a Nordic perspective: "Lämna tanken om att AI är en kamp mellan människa och maskin" (Svenska Dagbladet, Jan 31.), "Lätt att hävda maskinernas överlägsenhet om man tonar ner människans insats" (Dagens Nyheter, March 5) and "Det krävs mänsklig erfarenhet när vi pratar om människan och maskinen" (Dagens Nyheter, May 22).

His monograph Cycles of data: Environment, Population, Administration, and the Cultural Techniques of Early Digitalization (Mediehistoriskt arkiv 2021), demonstrates how the origins of our data-driven present can be traced back to changes in fundamental operations such as modeling, linking, and reuse in the 1960s and 70s. Already half a century ago, the downplaying of human labor in digital work, imaginaries of data as a "raw" resource, the management of data as "capital", and an algorithmic understanding of the natural environment were articulated by big tech of the day, i.e. the agencies of the welfare state , insurance companies, and research institutions in the natural sciences.

In addition to errors, in his research, Fredrikzon has published on the processes of erasure, waste, and decay at the intersection of digital media and material culture. For a general audience, he has recently written a book-length essay on death and the act of writing (Norstedts 2023) as well as a book chapter on nuclear radiation in an anthology on death and dying in the history of ideas (Appell 2022).

Fredrikzon has taught on the history of future studies, the history of radiation as a problem of communication, key concepts in Foucault, postcolonial theory, and the history of technological critique. In the summer of 2015 Fredrikzon was a visitor at the IKKM center for the study of cultural techniques at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar and in 2018–19 he was a research affiliate at Film & Media Studies, Yale University.

To contact Johan Fredrikzon, please use: fredrikzon@berkeley.edu or +1 (341) 333-8232.