The (SCOPUS / WoS / ISI) GLOCAL Conference on Linguistic Socio-Cultural Anthropology 2027,  AI, Anthropological Intelligence, is timely.

The global expansion of soft and hard technologies, centrally Artificial Intelligence, has problematized the ontological realities of humanity, the increasing socialization of humanity into these technologies, the mechanized subjugations of humanity to generative automation, and the capacity of the human beyond that of generative artificial intelligence, within and beyond the realm of communication.

This unprecedented technological eruption and engulfment of humanity have forced attention to how we as humans must negotiate our discursive and interactive capacities with and through these technologies. Reactions have been complex: Fear, uncertainty and trepidation, attempts to align with yet capitalize on new technologies, concern with current and future securities, deliberation on the survival of humanity, a retraining of humanity to compete with these technologies and to hence ameliorate fears of redundancy of the human, a rethinking of human evolution and its ontology vis-à-vis intelligent technologies, and efforts to ensure that the capacities of the human continue to exceed those of artificial intelligence. However, a central response has been a patent shift in processes of human communication with and through these intelligent technologies.

At the core of these discursive linkages between the human and technology is the anthropological question of how language and the social and cultural psychologies of these technologies overlap, that is, how shall the human subject now communicatively position themselves in relation to these technologies. The pathways to address this anthropological question include the following.

• Understanding the interactions and intersubjectivities of the human with and through emerging technologies
• Describing the purposes and legitimacies of interaction between the human and generative technologies
• Defining the purpose of technologies as devices that mediate human interaction and functional human existence
• Envisaging new possibilities through which technologies such as ChatGPT can mediate human interaction and purpose, not least of which are language, linguistics, communication, and the maintenance of semiotics that pervade human processes
• Negotiating the semiotics of these new technologies in (post)structural relation to the human
• Investigating the technologically mediated potentialities of the interactions of humans, as sentient-sapient beings

The above pathways crucially respond to the linguistic anthropological question of how humanity will communicate with and amongst these new technologies. Until the present time, this question has been inadequately addressed. Yet, the semiotics of interaction, communication, and mediation with relevance to technology are now universal, evidencing that anthropological attention to the discursive interactions of the human with and amongst the intelligent machine will assist to ground resolutions to that which is the most significant issue of our modern history, the subjugation of the human to, or the replacement of the human by, the intelligent machine.

The (SCOPUS / WoS / ISI) GLOCAL Conference on Linguistic Socio-Cultural Anthropology 2027, themed

AI, Anthropological Intelligence, will bring together linguistic and sociocultural anthropologists, and scholars and experts of technology, social planning, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, critical theorists, as well as governments, industry forerunners, and beyond, to deliberate on the tensions between artificial and anthropological intelligence, and to discuss pathways to discover solutions that ramify throughout human societies globally.

The GLOCAL 2027 conference thus has several purposes: To contribute to and alter thinking, policy, and the implementation of policy, with regards to human communication with and through intelligent technologies; to draw on work in the applied, linguistic, and cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics (and so forth) of off- and online interaction, in order to develop work that repositions the potency and agencies of anthropological intelligences (the multiple intelligences of the human). These intelligences themselves mediate developments and agencies in technology; to draw on anthropological scholarship to bring together scholars and global experts who will convene to rethink human communication and interaction with and through intelligent technologies; to invite discussions on the ways in which anthropological intelligences, as an affordance grounded in the creation and appropriation of semiotic practices and structures, have the capacity to evolve beyond limitations imposed by technology, following grounding work by those such as Gregory Bateson; to bring together scholars the world over to deliberate on classical linguistic sociocultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and language and society, to rethink the appropriation of such classical linguistic anthropology (ideology, semiotics, language documentation, and so forth) in an era of pervasive intelligent technologies.

Both human sentience and sapience contribute to the construction of human AI, that is, Anthropological Intelligences. As a marked difference between the human and intelligent technologies, the human is well equipped to embody influences and stimulants in diverse, adoptive, and organic ways, to extrapolate novel symbolisms predicated on the infinity of time, space, social interaction, and environmental factors, only to subjectively assess these diverse stimulants and their symbolisms. The (inter)subjectivities of the human cultivate intelligences to govern growth and to engineer socio-cognitive and communicative pathways through which to reflexively manage and elevate these intelligences. While clustering these intelligences together in infinite permutations, the human subject is intelligently positioned to continuously redesign symbolisms in order to adapt to both sapient and sentient domains.

The conference seeks to reposition the human against a revolution that threatens not to disprove intelligences in the anthropos, but that threatens to denigrate human semiotic potentials and ontologies to ultimately render dominant intelligent technologies over the human. To this, the global experts and scholars at the conference will seek to find resolutions to the issue of how generative technologies are indeed affecting the expansion of that which should otherwise be infinite in the human and in humanity, the growth of intelligence and the boundless manipulation of semiotics, cum aut sine the mediation of intelligent technologies.