SPOKEN THOUGHT · SURFACING · BRIDGING · COMPLETED

AI and the (human) Semiosphere

Spoken thought

Questions it asks

Surfacing: reading AI as a cultural condition, not a technology beat.

Bridging: how meaning moves, and breaks, between AI systems and the human semiosphere.

Stage

Completed

Years

2023

Place

Online (Technosemiotics)

Role

Speaker

The encounter

AI as a cultural condition

By mid-2023, AI had stopped being a topic for one community and become an infrastructure for many at once: policymaking, autonomous transport, retail surveillance, agricultural monitoring, insurance, urban robotics, intellectual property. The pressing question was no longer whether AI was reshaping each of these domains in isolation, but whether anyone had a framework that could read across them as a single cultural condition. Juri Lotman’s semiosphere (culture modelled as a shared meaning-space whose elementary act of thinking is translation) turned out to be exactly such a framework.

What was made

Mapping AI across four cultural models

A lecture delivered online on 10 July 2023 for Technosemiotics, presented as the work of Semiozic OÜ alongside the doctoral research at the University of Tartu. Using John Hartley’s four-model account of creative industries (Creative Clusters, Creative Services, Creative Citizens, Creative Cities), the talk mapped present AI deployments across each register:

Policy: the US AI Bill of Rights, the EU AI Act.
Transport: Starship’s autonomous delivery robots, Auve Tech’s hydrogen-powered self-driving vehicles, Volkswagen’s CARIAD, the Bolt–University of Tartu partnership for autonomous ride-hailing.
Agriculture: JD.com’s pig-monitoring system, Alibaba’s ET Agricultural Brain.
Retail: body-movement and biometric surveillance in US shopping environments.
Urban: Wendy Ju’s robotic trash barrels in New York, the NYPD’s 15,000+ camera surveillance network mapped by Amnesty International, the Knightscope K5 security robot, S.T.O.P.’s March 2023 lawsuit against the NYPD.
Intellectual property: the 2023 wave of AI lawsuits (visual copyright, musical likeness, design patent), framed as Hartley’s CI-1 (industry) clashing with CI-3 (citizens).

The Amazon Go biometric-disclosure case (New York City, January 2021 onward) was the worked example of Creative Cities friction with Creative Clusters: a single store layout placing one disclosure sign at the end of six side-by-side entrance doors.

What it shows

Friction is where the work is

The lecture argues that AI does not enter culture as an outside force; it enters as friction between Hartley’s four cultural-industrial models, and the friction is precisely where semiotic work needs to happen. It is also, structurally, the deck I would use today to introduce industry audiences to what semiotics offers when an organisation needs to read AI as a cultural condition rather than a tooling question.

Event: Technosemiotics (online), 10 July 2023
Presented as the work of Semiozic OÜ and PhD research, University of Tartu
Key theoretical references: Lotman 1990 · Hartley 2015 (Urban semiosis) · Campbell, Olteanu & Kull 2019 · Seif 2019 · Steffen et al. 2015 (planetary boundaries) · Kozicki 2023a

Technosemiotics · online · 2023