Johan H. Fredrikzon

Bio

M.Sc. Computer Science (Stockholm University, 2013)
Ph.D. History of Ideas (Stockholm University, 2021)


Johan Fredrikzon is a researcher at The Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and during the 2024–25 academic year a visiting scholar Stanford University. In 2022–2024, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California, Berkeley and in 2018–19 a research affiliate at Yale University.

In his research, Fredrikzon is interested in problems of loss, disappearance, errors, waste, and decay as concerns and opportunities in areas of labor, knowledge, risk, and creativity.

Fredrikzon's current project The Making of Human Mistakes in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, 1940–1990 (financed by the Swedish Research Council) is an investigation of the history of artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspective of errors and mistakes. Not in the sense of failed AI projects or a general view of AI as a flawed undertaking, but as a study of how the notion of what constitutes an error has influenced what has counted as intelligence in humans and machines, respectively.

His 2021 monograph, Cycles of data : Environment, Population, Administration, and the Cultural Techniques of Early Digitalization is an investigation of digitalization as a societal process in Scandinavia, circa 1965–1980. It argues that we should understand this process as the work of three cultural techniques: modeling, linking, and reuse which operated simultaneously within environmental sciences, population statistics, and office administration. Fredrikzon demonstrates that 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.

Fredrikzon is a working editor at Sensorium, a peer-reviewed journal based at Linköping University devoted to philosophies, histories, and imaginaries of media, art, and literature. In addition to teaching undergraduate classes in the history of Western thought from the Pre-Socratics through Postcolonial theory, Fredrikzon has taught extensively on the histories of digital technology, technological critique, futurology and futures studies, as well as the concepts of death in the age of nuclear radiation.

As of May 2023, Fredrikzon is under contract with the leading Nordic publisher Fri Tanke to write a history of artificial intelligence (AI). The aim is to produce an accessible account of how thinking in AI has devleoped over time and what’s currently at stake as society tries to grasp with this potentially disruptive technology.


Recent publications:

Book chapter: “John Durham Peters (1999) Speaking Into the Air”, Classics med Media Theory, Routledge, 2024

Peer-reviewed article: ”ARARAT 1976: The Exhibition as Environing Medium”, Journal of Social and Cultural Possibilities, Temple University, 2024

Peer-reviewed article: "Towards erasure studies: Excavating the material conditions of memory and forgetting" Memory, Mind & Media, Cambridge, 2023 (co-authored with Chris Haffenden).

Book chapter, ”Döden och författaren”, Bildningsboxen 2, Norstedts, 2023 [in Swedish, book-length essay on death and the act of writing].

Book chapter, ”Strålningsdöden”, Dödens idéhistoria, Appell, 2022 [in Swedish, on the conception of nuclear radiation as existential risk in an anthology on death and dying in the history of ideas].