Defining Ourselves through Tools
Featuring Zed Adams, Vice President of Technology and Associate Professor of Philosophy
F(r)ictions: Creative Work in an Age of AI {2026 symposium}
In this video, Zed Adams, Vice President of Technology, turns to a question most conversations about AI skip past entirely. What does it mean for a person to define themselves through their tools? He pointed out that new technologies work in two directions, letting people become something new, the way the invention of writing created the writer, while also letting people define themselves against a technology, the way calling someone a computer used to be a compliment and now sounds almost inhuman. Which direction is AI pulling us in right now?
Adams is less worried about replacement than about a kind of atrophy that is harder to notice while it is happening. If a university leans on AI for admissions decisions or curriculum planning, does the work disappear, or does it just flatten into something a machine decided instead of a person? He extends the same unease to property rights, tracing a century of expansions that turned things once considered uncommonly ownable, like color itself, into intellectual property, and turned entire genres of music, like sample-based hip hop of the 1990s, into legal impossibilities. What did we gain from that expansion, and what did it cost us? Watch the video for his full remarks.
At: The New School, New York City
On: Friday, May 1, 2026
Sponsored by: The New School's Office of University Initiatives
Video Production: Tatiana Stolpovskaya
Selected Works
We investigate how AI transforms the conditions, politics, and value of creative work.
