Archive (Page 1 of 2)

Watch Your Words

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. 

Surveillance State of the Union

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.

Kaleidoscope: Positionality-aware Machine Learning

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

AI Blindspot is a dis­cov­ery process for spot­ting uncon­scious bias­es and struc­tur­al inequal­i­ties in AI systems.

Rebel Scientists

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.

Forbidden Research: Rites vs. Rights — Islam, Women’s Rights, and Global Security

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.

Forbidden Research: Sexual Deviance: Can Technology Protect our Children?

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.

Forbidden Research: Messing with Nature Part I: Genetics

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?

Forbidden Research: Messing with Nature Part II: Climate

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.

Forbidden Research: Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance

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.

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