Open Transcripts

Pirate in the Empire

presented by Julia Reda

I think in order to under­stand why the Pirate Party came about as a polit­i­cal par­ty, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment and by the cul­tur­al lob­by­ists in par­tic­u­lar. And what kinds of mea­sures were being lob­bied for by the cul­tur­al indus­tries, espe­cial­ly the sur­veil­lance of people’s online behav­ior, which we’ve only learned prob­a­bly years lat­er was going to become a much broad­er prob­lem for a fun­da­men­tal rights.

The Conversation #49 — Scott Douglas

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Scott Douglas

People think that the Civil Rights Movement and all big epochal move­ments involve con­science, and they do. They also involve con­scious­ness. I mean, you can’t strug­gle against what you’re unaware off, right? The Klan as the icon­ic car­ri­ers of vio­lence, the Bull Connor of the icon­ic south­ern white male resis­tance, George Wallace the icon­ic neopop­ulist racist. You know, these were his­toric fig­ures in myth and real­i­ty. But we wouldn’t get to what they rep­re­sent­ed till much lat­er.

I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production

presented by Hito Steyerl

Let’s ask a very sim­ple ques­tion. Why are there so many art projects today? Because we live in the world of mass art pro­duc­tion. Basically every­one is an artist nowa­days. Or at least he or she has an artis­tic project. We can speak of a surge in the cre­ation of art. The pro­duc­tion of art is pro­lif­er­at­ing.

MIT Media Lab Defiance: Introduction

presented by Ethan Zuckerman, Joi Ito

Part of what’s real­ly inter­est­ing at the moment is that most peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly young peo­ple, don’t have a lot of faith in insti­tu­tions. They’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly excit­ed about this idea that we go to the polls, we elect rep­re­sen­ta­tives, those rep­re­sen­ta­tives speak for us and that is how change hap­pens.

The (Nonviolent) Struggle is Real

presented by Jamila Raqib

Behind-the-scenes plan­ning is often over­looked by observers and by the media because it’s what the cam­eras often can’t cap­ture. I’ve wit­nessed it for fif­teen years at the Albert Einstein Institution. This qui­et capacity-building and struc­tur­al work. The plan­ning and prepa­ra­tions that make move­ments more effec­tive.

Rebel Scientists

presented by G. Pascal Zachary

I’m going to make an argu­ment in this talk that dis­sent is valu­able not mere­ly to estab­lish your moral dimen­sion or to make a moral act or moral pos­ture. It’s essen­tial to sci­en­tif­ic progress. So we can’t do with­out dis­sent; it’s not an affec­ta­tion.

Ethical Machines episode 4: David J. Klein

presented by David J. Klein, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

One of the most impor­tant insights that I’ve got­ten in work­ing with biol­o­gists and ecol­o­gists is that today it’s actu­al­ly not real­ly known on a sci­en­tif­ic basis how well dif­fer­ent con­ser­va­tion inter­ven­tions will work. And it’s because we just don’t have a lot of data.

Jonny Sun and Jonathan Zittrain on Joke Tweets, Memes, and Being an Alien Online

presented by Jonathan Sun, Jonathan Zittrain

I think I kind of have float­ed through the world feel­ing like an out­sider and feel­ing a bit like an alien, I guess. And along the way I’ve met so many oth­er peo­ple who have felt like that too, and I think this is a cel­e­bra­tion of that kind of diver­si­ty and of that kind of out­sider­dom.

Data Science Reasoning

presented by Anne L. Washington

During this year that I have been off I’ve been think­ing about how to teach both peo­ple who are trained in tech­ni­cal parts of data sci­ence, and also pol­i­cy­mak­ers, how we could have a com­mon lan­guage. And then that way we could have these con­ver­sa­tions so we could talk togeth­er.

Stats and the City: A Data-Driven Approach to Criminal Justice and Child Welfare

presented by Ravi Shroff

My fel­low­ship project is to under­stand the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of pre­dic­tive mod­els for decision-making in city and state gov­ern­ment. So specif­i­cal­ly I’m inter­est­ed in apply­ing and devel­op­ing sta­tis­ti­cal and com­pu­ta­tion­al meth­ods to improve decision-making in police depart­ments, in the courts, and in child wel­fare agen­cies.

Artificial Intelligence: Education and Personalized Learning

presented by Cynthia Breazeal

I think there are count­less amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and its impact on soci­ety. I think one of the areas I’m tru­ly the most excit­ed about is edu­ca­tion.

Artificial Intelligence: Society in the Loop

presented by Iyad Rahwan

Some of the long-term chal­lenges are very hypothetical—we don’t real­ly know if they will ever mate­ri­al­ize in this way. But in the short term I think AI pos­es some reg­u­la­to­ry chal­lenges for soci­ety.

Data & Society Databite #101: Machine Learning: What’s Fair and How Do We Decide?

presented by Suchana Seth

The ques­tion is what are we doing in the indus­try, or what is the machine learn­ing research com­mu­ni­ty doing, to com­bat instances of algo­rith­mic bias? So I think there is a cer­tain amount of good news, and it’s the good news that I want­ed to focus on in my talk today. 

Ethical Machines episode 3: Alex J. Champandard and Gene Kogan

presented by Alex J. Champandard, Gene Kogan, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

For any artists that are work­ing in this field now, if I was good at paint­ing I’d prob­a­bly be look­ing at how to find styles that work well with these kind of rep­re­sen­ta­tions and make them eas­i­ly automat­able or trans­fer­able so that if I had fans as an artist they could say, ​“Hey, I would like to have a pic­ture of my cat paint­ed.”

Designing AI to Complement Humanity

presented by Barbara Grosz

I think one of the things I want to say from the start is it’s not like AI is going to appear. It’s actu­al­ly out there, in some instances in ways that we nev­er even notice.

Artificial Intelligence: Challenges of Extended Intelligence

presented by Joi Ito

Machine learn­ing sys­tems that we have today have become so pow­er­ful and are being intro­duced into every­thing from self-driving cars, to pre­dic­tive polic­ing, to assist­ing judges, to pro­duc­ing your news feed on Facebook on what you ought to see. And they have a lot of soci­etal impacts. But they’re very dif­fi­cult to audit.

Postcapitalism

presented by Paul Mason

Neoliberalism is bro­ken. The eco­nom­ic mod­el of the last thir­ty years. It worked for a bit, dragged the bot­tom two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion up the income scale dra­mat­i­cal­ly, facil­i­tat­ed the tech rev­o­lu­tion. But it’s stopped work­ing.

Social and Ethical Challenges of AI

presented by danah boyd

One of the chal­lenges of build­ing new tech­nolo­gies is that we often want them to solve things that have been very social­ly dif­fi­cult to solve. Things that we don’t have answers to, prob­lems that we don’t know how we would best go about it in a social­ly respon­si­ble way. 

Ethical Machines episode 2: Jack Clark

presented by Jack Clark, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

If you think about it what we’re doing is we’re turn­ing very high-dimensional math­e­mat­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of a sort of large knowl­edge space into intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. Which should be the most fright­en­ing idea in the world to any­one. This is from most abstract thing you could pos­si­bly try and turn into a cap­i­tal­ist object.

The Stupefying Smart City

presented by Richard Sennett

What I’m wor­ried about is that with the tech­no­log­i­cal tools that we have today, as in the past, our first use of them is the least inven­tive that we can make. And the issue is how urban­ists can actu­al­ly use these new tools well rather than use them in a way which is harm­ful.

Your Body is a Honeypot
Loving Out Loud When There’s No Place to Hide

presented by Jillian C York, Matthew Stender

We have to ask who’s cre­at­ing this tech­nol­o­gy and who ben­e­fits from it. Who should have the right to col­lect and use infor­ma­tion about our faces and our bod­ies? What are the mech­a­nisms of con­trol? We have gov­ern­ment con­trol on the one hand, cap­i­tal­ism on the oth­er hand, and this murky grey zone between who’s build­ing the tech­nol­o­gy, who’s cap­tur­ing, and who’s ben­e­fit­ing from it.

AI and Ethical Design

presented by Beth Altringer

I teach my stu­dents that design is ongo­ing risky decision-making. And what I mean by ongo­ing is that you nev­er real­ly get to stop ques­tion­ing the assump­tions that you’re mak­ing and that are under­ly­ing what it is that you’re creating—those fun­da­men­tal premis­es.

Evgeny Morozov Keynote at Internetdagarna 2015

presented by Evgeny Morozov

If you look at the appeal that Silicon Valley has to a lot of us, and to a lot of pub­lic insti­tu­tions espe­cial­ly, I think you can under­stand that the rea­son for that appeal is very sim­ple. They can offer ser­vices that work, that work in a very effec­tive man­ner, and that are offered more or less either very cheap or are most­ly offered for free.

Be Warned: Copy Silicon Valley and You Will Surely Fail

presented by Nilofer Merchant

As I’ve been get­ting ready to actu­al­ly return back to Silicon Valley after two years I’ve got this feel­ing in my gut that some­thing is ter­ri­bly wrong if Europe adopts Silicon Valley’s metaphor for suc­cess.

Ethical Machines episode 1: Mark Riedl

presented by Mark Riedl, Roelof Pieters, Samim Winiger

Computers can tell sto­ries but they’re always sto­ries that humans have input into a com­put­er, which are then just being regur­gi­tat­ed. But they don’t make sto­ries up on their own. They don’t real­ly under­stand the sto­ries that we tell. They’re not kind of aware of the cul­tur­al impor­tance of sto­ries. They can’t watch the same movies or read the same books we do. And this seems like this huge miss­ing gap between what com­put­ers can do and humans can do if you think about how impor­tant sto­ry­telling is to the human con­di­tion.

 

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