AI Policy Futures is a research effort to explore the relationship between science fiction around AI and the social imaginaries of AI. What those social measures can teach us about real technology policy today. We seem to tell the same few stories about AI, and they’re not very helpful.
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Bridging AI Fact and Fiction
presented by Ed Finn, Kristin Sharp, Malka Older, Molly Wright Steenson, Stephanie Dinkins
This is going to be a conversation about science fiction not just as a cultural phenomenon, or a body of work of different kinds, but also as a kind of method or a tool.
How people think about AI depends largely on how they know AI. And to the point, how the most people know AI is through science fiction, which sort of raises the question, yeah? What stories are we telling ourselves about AI in science fiction?
How Sci‐Fi Reflects Our AI Hopes and Fears
presented by Kanta Dihal
We came up with the idea to write a short paper…trying to make some sense of those many narratives that we have around artificial intelligence and see if we could divide them up into different hopes and different fears.
AI in Reality
presented by Elana Zeide, Lindsey Sheppard, Miranda Bogen, Rumman Chowdhury, Kevin Bankston
When data scientists talk about bias, we talk about quantifiable bias that is a result of let’s say incomplete or incorrect data. And data scientists love living in that world—it’s very comfortable. Why? Because once it’s quantified if you can point out the error you just fix the error. What this does not ask is should you have built the facial recognition technology in the first place?
AI in Sci‐Fi
presented by Andrew Hudson, Chris Noessel, Damien Williams, Kanta Dihal, Lee Konstantinou, Madeline Ashby
What I hope we can do in this panel is have a slightly more literary discussion to try to answer well why were those the stories that we were telling and what has been the point of telling those stories even though they don’t now necessarily always align with the policy problems that we’re having.
The Sci‐Fi Feedback Loop
presented by Kevin Bankston
We’re here because the imaginary futures of science fiction impact our real future much more than we probably realize. There is a powerful feedback loop between sci‐fi and real‐world technical and tech policy innovation and if we don’t stop and pay attention to it, we can’t harness it to help create better features including better and more inclusive futures around AI.
Projecting the Future of Cyberspace
presented by Betsy Cooper
What we’re trying to do is to see over the horizons, looking at essentially a five‐year time frame, and identify what will be the cybersecurity landscape in that context.
Civic Tech for Good
presented by Baratunde Thurston, Vivian Graubard
I was at the White House for almost six years. And most of the time that I was there was spent on trying to bring sort of these best practices that we knew worked in the tech industry to bear in government when it came to policy implementation.
The Spawn of Frankenstein: Fear of the Unknown
presented by Annalee Newitz, David Guston, Charlotte Gordon, Jacob Brogan, Bina Venkataraman
It’s not the strangeness of new technologies that frightens us but the way technology threatens to make us strangers to ourselves. In a semi‐Freudian spirit, then, I’d like to propose that where Frankenstein and its spawn are concerned, our fear of the unknown may really be about our discomfort with knowing.