Temporal Disorientation and AI: On Oblivion and Future Creation

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in how knowledge is produced, organised and accessed, it also raises fundamental questions about our relationship with the past and our capacity to imagine the future.

On 17 October 2026, Who Owns Memory? Democratic Participation in Digital Public History will host an online open lecture by Dr Giannis Perperidis, PhD in Philosophy of Technology, exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence, memory and temporality.

The lecture, “Temporal Disorientation and AI: On Oblivion and Future Creation,” examines how AI—and more specifically probabilistic algorithms—has brought about certain ontological rearrangements that may produce a form of temporal disorientation.

The past is increasingly accessed through data processing and probabilistic calculations that do not necessarily reach facts themselves, while the future tends to appear as a repetition of projections derived from this “past.” The result, Dr Perperidis argues, can be the sense of a persistent, futureless present.

Against this background, the lecture will consider the philosophical consequences of this temporal disorientation and return to the central question of the project: Who owns memory?

What does this question mean when our encounters with the past are increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems? What happens to oblivion, historical understanding and the possibility of creating genuinely different futures? And what might these transformations mean for generations to come?

The lecture extends the conversations developed throughout Who Owns Memory? by approaching questions of memory, digital technologies and the future from the perspective of the philosophy of technology.

Event details

17 October 2026 | 19:30 Greece time (EEST) / 18:30 Central European time (CEST)
Speaker: Dr Giannis Perperidis
Format: Online
Registration: Required

Registered participants will receive the online access details by email before the event.

Register for the Open Lecture

The lecture is open to the wider public.

About the speaker

Dr Giannis Perperidis holds a PhD in Philosophy of Technology from the Philosophy Department of the University of Ioannina, Greece. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History and Digital Humanities at the Ionian University and at the National Centre for Social Research, Greece.

Dr Perperidis has previously held postdoctoral research positions at the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Panteion University, as well as teaching positions at the Department of History and Digital Humanities at the Ionian University. His PhD research was supported by a scholarship from the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.).

His academic work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals including Technology in Society, Science as Culture, and Philosophy & Technology. He is the author of Philosophy of Digital Technologies: From Andrew Feenberg to the Digital Commons (in Greek, 2025) and Artificial “Intelligence” Confronting Itself: Rethinking the Human-Nature-Technology Relation (in Greek, 2026).