The premise of our project is really that we are surrounded by machines that are reading what we write, and judging us based on whatever they think we’re saying.
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We wanted to look at how surveillance, how these algorithmic decisionmaking systems and surveillance systems feed into this kind of targeting decisionmaking. And in particular what we’re going to talk about today is the role of the AI research community. How that research ends up in the real world being used with real-world consequences.
Positionality is the specific position or perspective that an individual takes given their past experiences, their knowledge; their worldview is shaped by positionality. It’s a unique but partial view of the world. And when we’re designing machines we’re embedding positionality into those machines with all of the choices we’re making about what counts and what doesn’t count.
AI Blindspot is a discovery process for spotting unconscious biases and structural inequalities in AI systems.
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.
If we look at a lot of the things we’ve been speaking about today, be it genetic engineering or the things that occur in our daily lives, the challenge of reproductive rights, or global peace and security, a lot of the stagnation, a lot of the challenges, are actually rooted either in the perception of religion or in the political manipulation of religion.
One of the big things that we’re going to talk about here is paraphilia. We’re going to talk about sexual deviance. We’re going to talk about the problem of people whose sexual desires lead to attraction to children, lead to attraction towards violent sex, lead to sexual transgression in one fashion or another.
When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genetic engineering, how do we proceed wisely? How do we balance our own wildness and civility as we develop increasingly powerful ways to interact with the living world?
Solar geoengineering rests on a simple idea that it is technically possible to make the Earth a little more reflective so that it absorbs a little less sunlight, which would partly counteract some of the risks that come from accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When I say technically possible, it appears that at least doing this in a crude way is actually easy, in the sense that it could be done with commercial off-the-shelf technologies now, and it could be done at a cost that is really trivial, sort of a part in a thousand or a part in ten thousand of global GDP.
When I announced the talk on Twitter, somebody immediately was like, “Lawful abuse, isn’t that a contradiction?” But if you think about it for just a moment it might seem to be a little bit more clear. After all, the legality of a thing is quite distinct from the morality of it.