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The Spawn of Frankenstein: Unintended Consequences

presented by Cara LaPointe, Joey Eschrich, Samuel Arbesman, Susan Tyler Hitchcock

Victor’s sin was­n’t in being too ambi­tious, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in play­ing God. It was in fail­ing to care for the being he cre­at­ed, fail­ing to take respon­si­bil­i­ty and to pro­vide the crea­ture what it need­ed to thrive, to reach its poten­tial, to be a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment for soci­ety instead of a disaster.

The Spawn of Frankenstein: It’s Alive

presented by Ed Finn

Mary Shelley’s nov­el has been an incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful mod­ern myth. And so this con­ver­sa­tion today is not just about what hap­pened 200 years ago, but the remark­able ways in which that moment and that set of ideas has con­tin­ued to per­co­late and evolve and reform in cul­ture, in tech­no­log­i­cal research, in ethics, since then.

The Spawn of Frankenstein: Playing God

presented by Ed Finn, Josephine Johnston, Nancy Kress, Patric M. Verrone

In Shelley’s vision, Frankenstein was the mod­ern Prometheus. The hip, up to date, learned, vital god who chose to cre­ate human life and paid the dire con­se­quences. To Shelley, gods cre­ate and for humans to do that is bad. Bad for oth­ers but espe­cial­ly bad for one’s creator. 

Sleepwalking into Surveillant Capitalism, Sliding into Authoritarianism

presented by Zeynep Tufekci

We have increas­ing­ly smart, sur­veil­lant per­sua­sion archi­tec­tures. Architectures aimed at per­suad­ing us to do some­thing. At the moment it’s click­ing on an ad. And that seems like a waste. We’re just click­ing on an ad. You know. It’s kind of a waste of our ener­gy. But increas­ing­ly it is going to be per­suad­ing us to sup­port some­thing, to think of some­thing, to imag­ine something.

The Things of the Internet
Reflections on Object Culture and Internet Culture

presented by An Xiao Mina

The Internet meme frame­work is a use­ful way to under­stand a cer­tain range of object pro­duc­tion, a cer­tain sort of infor­mal pro­duc­tion that com­bines net­worked modes of pro­duc­tion sim­i­lar to shanzhai or the hat print­ing, with the glob­al reach of the Internet and glob­al ship­ping ser­vices as well. The abil­i­ty to move bits and atoms with just as much ease and efficiency.

AI and Human Development

presented by Kate Darling

Increasingly we’re using auto­mat­ed tech­nol­o­gy in ways that kind of sup­port humans in what they’re doing rather than just hav­ing algo­rithms work on their own, because they’re not smart enough to do that yet or deal with unex­pect­ed situations.

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.

Openness and Oversight of Artificial Intelligence

presented by Jonathan Zittrain

If you have a sys­tem that can wor­ry about stuff that you don’t have to wor­ry about any­more, you can turn your atten­tion to oth­er pos­si­bly more inter­est­ing or impor­tant issues.

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. 

AI Threats to Civil Liberties and Democracy

presented by Chinmayi Arun

In a world of con­flict­ing val­ues, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult to devel­op val­ues for AI that are not the low­est com­mon denominator.

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