A Future Worth Thinking About

This weekend, Virginia Tech’s Center for the Humanities is hosting The Human Futures and Intelligent Machines Summit, and there is a link for the video cast of the events. You’ll need to Download and install Zoom, but it should be pretty straightforward, other than that.

You’ll find the full Schedule, below the cut.

“Human Futures and Intelligent Machines”

A Summit by the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech

Friday, June 8, 2018    Athenaeum, Room 124, Newman Library of Virginia Tech

8:00 am – 8:45 am  Breakfast

8:45 am  – 9:15 am        Opening Remarks and Introductions

9:15 am – 10:45 am        Session 1

• Josh Brown (Google translate vs. Skynet:  the distinction between passive and active AI.  This talk will present some background on fast-moving developments in AI and deep learning, with a somewhat high-level overview of technological developments.)

10:45 am – 11:00 am     Break

11:00 am – 12:30 pm    Session 2

• Daylan Dufelmeier (Daylan Dufelmeier will be speaking on current issues in the criminal justice system, the potential ramifications of using advanced computing in the criminal justice arena and what is currently happening.)
• Mario Khreiche (“Microlabor as Automation in Amazon Mechanical Turk” The talk provides context on the online microlabor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), discusses its main functions and modes of labor distribution, and argues for a more critical notion of automation and artificial intelligence in order to account for the ways in which human labor continues to be built in and concealed in AMT.)

12:30 pm – 1:45 pm        Lunch

1:45 pm – 3:15 pm         Session 3

• Aaron Nicholson ((1)Overview of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) and how it supports Atlanta Police Department (APD) (2) Current Technology of APD and uses; Integrated Camera System and LPR’s (3)The At-Promise Initiative and how it works (4) The use of AI and the implications on law enforcement (5) The use of AI and the implications on Community Oriented Policing efforts (6) The disparity that is already implied in policing today and the impacts of a fully AI integrated police force will have on minorities and lower income communities.)
• Ralph Hall (Rethinking Employment in a Future of Intelligent Machines. In this talk, Dr. Hall will explore the challenges society will face if current employment and income trends persist into the future.)

3:15 pm – 3: 30 pm         Break

3:30 pm – 5:00 pm        Session 4

• Jacob Thebault-Spieker (Discussion on how pro-urban and pro-wealth biases manifest in online systems, and  how this likely influences the ‘education’ of AI systems.)
• Hani Awni (Despite the rhetoric used in the AI field, ongoing cognitive science research into the mechanisms of human abstract reasoning have articulated categorically distinct types of information. Because the AI approaches that are currently in vogue are fundamentally unable to represent or manipulate it, Hani Awni will describe ‘relational’ information as understood by cognitive scientists, with particular regard to the sociopolitical consequences for its exclusion from AI systems.)

Saturday, June 9, 2018    Athenaeum, Room 124, Newman Library of Virginia Tech

9:00 am – 9:30 am  Breakfast

9:30 am  – 11:00 am        Session 5

• Chelsea Frazier (Frazier will be offering provocations about the ways that predominant understandings of race, biocentrism, and intelligence threaten or maintain planetary sustainability in the face of increasingly rapid technological advancement.)
• Ras Michael Brown (“Nkisi Theory for A New Era in Hybrid Humanity” Brown’s remarks bring insights from an “old” Africana knowledge system to our queries about “new” issues raised by the blending of native and artificial intelligences and bodies)

11:00 am – 11:10 am         Break

11:10 am – 12:30 pm        Session 6

• Damien Williams (Considerations of how best to use interdisciplinary frameworks to convey the importance of both thinking about the biases we bring into the development of machine intelligence and human biotechnological interventions, and working to become more intentional about the values we build into these systems.)
• Sara Mattingly Jordan via Zoom (Dr. Mattingly-Jordan will talk about the current developments in the ethics regulation of AI. She will briefly review the landscape of players, documents, and types of pertinent activities (e.g., standards making etc). Dr. Jordan would like to talk about the problem of representation of diversity in AI and ethics scholarship and policy making.)

12:30 pm – 1:45 pm        Lunch

1:45 pm – 3:15 pm         Session 7

• Kent Myers (Dr. Myers will briefly review several ways in which the intelligence community is engaging with human aspects of AI. This ranges from the human factors design challenge in augmented intelligence, to various threats including influence operations, to assessing worldwide social consequences of automation.)
• Emma Stamm (Discussion on digital data as a medium of equivocation. Stamm will offer that datafication occludes the unique character of datafied phenomena insofar as it reconstructs them as political subjects.)

3:15 pm – 3: 30 pm         Break

3:30 pm – 5:00 pm        Session 8

• Joshua Earle ((1) What do we consider “enhancement”? How do we tell if something or someone is enhanced? How do we measure it? 2) What traits, if any, do we most want to enhance? 3) Who gets access to these enhancements? 4) If we do start to enhance, how do we avoid growing inequality gaps?

(Departures)

Even if you can’t be there, in person, I do hope you can tune in for some of it.

Until Next Time.