Open Transcripts

Hacking the Internet of Dongs
Hacking Sex Toys for Fun and Absolutely No Profit

presented by RenderMan

A large number of IoT research firms…yeah, they don’t want to look at this. Because there are stigmas around sex. We have a very weird thing in North America about sex. We’ll watch all the violence we want on television but you can’t see two people have sex.

Gay Science

presented by Frank Lantz, Robert Yang

How do we make gay worlds in video games? Well, I can tell you how not to make a gay world. You should not rely on the AAA game industry to pity you and leave you some table scraps. I’m tired of being 0.1% of a world, right. Why isn’t Dragon Age 100% gay sex, right?

Biohackers Die

presented by Jeffrey Tibbetts

So grinders are a community committed to radically altering the body. And so sometimes it’s treatments like transcranial magnetic, or direct current stimulation. It could be through the use of previously untested chemicals like VIP. Often it takes the form of implanted devices. All these approaches come with risks. What I’m going to focus on today is why despite all the risks being taken, a grinder hasn’t died yet.

Artificial Intelligence is Hard to See: Social & Ethical Impacts of AI

presented by Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen

The big concerns that I have about artificial intelligence are really not about the Singularity, which frankly computer scientists say is…if it’s possible at all it’s hundreds of years away. I’m actually much more interested in the effects that we are seeing of AI now.

The Tyranny of Algorithms and the Use of Predictive Policing by Israel

presented by Marwa Fatafta

We have been documenting and researching into human rights or digital rights violations that are taking place in Palestine and Israel. And one of the most recent case studies or work that we’re looking into is the use of predictive policing by Israel, which is rather a sensitive issue given that there isn’t a lot that we know about the subject.

Big Data Bodies: Machines and Algorithms in the World

presented by Maya Indira Ganesh

I’m interested in data and discrimination, in the things that have come to make us uniquely who we are, how we look, where we are from, our personal and demographic identities, what languages we speak. These things are effectively incomprehensible to machines. What is generally celebrated as human diversity and experience is transformed by machine reading into something absurd, something that marks us as different.

What Do We Do About the Haters?

presented by Jillian C York

A lot of the topics that we’re trying to “tackle” or trying to deal with on the Internet, we’re not actually defining ahead of time. And so what we’ve ended up with is a system whereby both companies, and governments alike, are working sometimes separately, sometimes together, to rid the Internet of these topics, of these discussions, without actually delving into what they are.

Reflection & Synthesis on Truthiness

presented by Urs Gasser

I’d like to cluster my thoughts and structure them into four categories. One is what I will call foundational issues. Second, a few words and observations regarding methods. Third, a few areas of application that we touched upon this morning, and maybe also highlighting one or two that we haven’t talked so much about but that I think are increasingly important. And then finally also as a segue to the following sessions, a few words about potential points of intervention.

Ethan Zuckerman on Truthiness

presented by Ethan Zuckerman

When you’re looking at something as big as these questions of verifiability, truth, truthiness, disinformation, so on and so forth, I find myself now trying to pick apart the questions we talked about this morning from the perspective of tractability. So let me use that to sort of frame a couple of the conversations we’ve had and then a couple of things that haven’t come up, and then see if I can sort of push us forward a little bit into where we go this afternoon.

Inflection Point on Truthiness

presented by Charles Nesson

Well I believe there is a truth we share. I think it’s our sense of justice. I think of the great Paul Newman depiction in The Verdict, his closing argument when he speaks to the jury and says, “You are the law. I believe there is justice in our hearts.” So the truth, the verdict. Vera dictos, speak the truth. That’s what juries are told to do.