The ethics behind machine learning and AI – surveillance, and governance

Today we’ll take a look at AI and try to think through some of the ethics behind it.

According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics are broken down into these 10 categories.

  • 2.1 Privacy & Surveillance
  • 2.2 Manipulation of Behaviour
  • 2.3 Opacity of AI Systems
  • 2.4 Bias in Decision Systems
  • 2.5 Human-Robot Interaction
  • 2.6 Automation and Employment
  • 2.7 Autonomous Systems
  • 2.8 Machine Ethics
  • 2.9 Artificial Moral Agents
  • 2.10 Singularity

Last year Biden issued a non binding Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights

MIT Sloan Experts Series – Renée Richardson Gosline: Human-Centered AI

CODED BIAS explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all.

Midterm Project: The Life Span of a Technological Object  

Loosely based on Kate Crawford’s Anatomy of an AI System , your midterm is a research project in which you create a multi-modular project such as a web site, video essay or podcast that provides a “map of a technological object” of your choice. Trace its production and development as you consider its environmental sustainability, the physical labor and digital labor practices involved in its development, and its ethical relationship to the end user and society at large.

Deliverables include: the media project and a written component 

Consider the three major parts of the objects life span:

  • Production/materials/labor/
  • User experience/ethical relationship to user and society/digital rights/historical roots/evolution of object/etc.
  • Sustainability/recycling/right to repair/

Homework

  1. Please read and write .5-1 pg response to Kate Crawford 1 and Vladan Joler 2 Anatomy of an AI System
  2. Please come up with an idea for your midterm project: The Life Span of a Technological Object

Anatomy of an AI System

Ai Anatomy Map

The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources

By Kate Crawford 1 and Vladan Joler 2

(2018)