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All posts tagged gender

A few months ago, I was approached by the School of Data Science, and the University Communications office, here at UNC Charlotte, to ask me to sit down for some coverage my Analytics Frontiers keynote, and my work on “AI,” broadly construed.

Well, I just found out that the profile that local station WRAL wrote on me went live back in June.

A Black man in a charcoal pinstipe suit jacket, a light grey dress shirt with a red and black Paisley tie, black jeans, black boots, and a black N95 medical mask stands on a stage in front of tables, chairs, and a large screen showing a slide containing images of the meta logo, the skynet logo, the google logo, a headshot of boris karloff as frankenstein's creature, the rectangular black interface with glowing red circle of HAL-9000, the OpenAI logo, and an image of the handwritten list of the attendees of the original 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (NB: all named attendees are men)

My conversations with the writer Shappelle Marshall both on the phone and email were really interesting, and I’m really quite pleased with the resulting piece, on the whole, especially our discussion of how bias (perspectives, values) of some kind will always make its way into all the technologies we make, so we should be trying to make sure they’re the perspectives and values we want, rather than the prejudices we might just so happen to have. Additionally, I appreciate that she included my differentiation between the practice of equity and the felt experience of fairness, because, well… *gestures broadly at everything*.

With all that being said, I definitely would’ve liked if they could have included some of our longer discussion around the ideas in the passage that starts “…AI and automation often create different types of work for human beings rather than eliminating work entirely.” What I was saying there is that “AI” companies keep promising a future where all “tedious work” is automated away, but actually creating a situation in which humans will actually have to do a lot more work (a la Ruth Schwartz Cowan)— and as we know, this has already been shown to be happening.

What I am for sure not saying there is some kind of “don’t worry, we’ll all still have jobs! :D” capitalist boosterism. We’re adaptable, yes, but the need for these particular adaptations is down to capitalism doing a combination of making us fill in any extra leisure time we get from automation with more work, and forcing us to figure a new way to Jobity Job or, y’know, starve.

But, ultimately, I think there’s still intimations of all of my positions, in this piece, along with everything else, even if they couldn’t include every single thing we discussed; there are only so many column inches in a day, after all. Also, anyone who finds me for the first through this article and then goes on to directly engage any of my writing or presentations (fingers crossed on that) will very quickly be disabused of any notion that I’m like, “rah-rah capital.”

Hopefully they’ll even learn and begin to understand Why I’m not. That’d be the real win.

Anywho: Shappelle did a fantastic job, and if you get a chance to talk with her, I recommend it. Here’s the piece, and I hope you enjoy it.

Hello Everyone.

Here is my prerecorded talk for the NC State R.L. Rabb Symposium on Embedding AI in Society.

There are captions in the video already, but I’ve also gone ahead and C/P’d the SRT text here, as well.
[2024 Note: Something in GDrive video hosting has broken the captions, but I’ve contacted them and hopefully they’ll be fixed soon.]

There were also two things I meant to mention, but failed to in the video:

1) The history of facial recognition and carceral surveillance being used against Black and Brown communities ties into work from Lundy Braun, Melissa N Stein, Seiberth et al., and myself on the medicalization and datafication of Black bodies without their consent, down through history. (Cf. Me, here: Fitting the description: historical and sociotechnical elements of facial recognition and anti-black surveillance”.)

2) Not only does GPT-3 fail to write about humanities-oriented topics with respect, it still can’t write about ISLAM AT ALL without writing in connotations of violence and hatred.

Also I somehow forgot to describe the slide with my email address and this website? What the hell Damien.

Anyway.

I’ve embedded the content of the resource slides in the transcript, but those are by no means all of the resources on this, just the most pertinent.

All of that begins below the cut.

 Black man with a mohawk and glasses, wearing a black button up shirt, a red paisley tie, a light grey check suit jacket, and black jeans, stands in front of two tall bookshelves full of books, one thin & red, one of wide untreated pine, and a large monitor with a printer and papers on the stand beneath it.

[First conference of the year; figured i might as well get gussied up.]

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Much of my research deals with the ways in which bodies are disciplined and how they go about resisting that discipline. In this piece, adapted from one of the answers to my PhD preliminary exams written and defended two months ago, I “name the disciplinary strategies that are used to control bodies and discuss the ways that bodies resist those strategies.” Additionally, I address how strategies of embodied control and resistance have changed over time, and how identifying and existing as a cyborg and/or an artificial intelligence can be understood as a strategy of control, resistance, or both.

In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, he spends some time discussing the different understandings of the word “discipline” and the role their transformations have played in the definition and transmission of knowledge as both artifacts and culture. In particular, he uses the space in section three of chapter two to discuss the role Foucault has played in historical understandings of knowledge, categorization, and disciplinarity. Using Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, we can draw an explicit connection between the various meanings “discipline” and ways that bodies are individually, culturally, and socially conditioned to fit particular modes of behavior, and the specific ways marginalized peoples are disciplined, relating to their various embodiments.

This will demonstrate how modes of observation and surveillance lead to certain types of embodiments being deemed “illegal” or otherwise unacceptable and thus further believed to be in need of methodologies of entrainment, correction, or reform in the form of psychological and physical torture, carceral punishment, and other means of institutionalization.

Locust, “Master and Servant (Depeche Mode Cover)”

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Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture” given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, in early September.

(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture,” talk given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, September 2019)

[Direct Link to the Mp3]

[Damien Patrick Williams]

Thank you, everybody, for being here. I’m going to stand a bit far back from this mic and project, I’m also probably going to pace a little bit. So if you can’t hear me, just let me know. This mic has ridiculously good pickup, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.

So the conversation that we’re going to be having today is titled as “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture.”

I’m using the term “SFF” to stand for “science fiction and fantasy,” but we’re going to be looking at pop culture more broadly, because ultimately, though science fiction and fantasy have some of the most obvious entrees into discussions of STS and how making doing culture, society can influence technology and the history of fictional worlds can help students understand the worlds that they’re currently living in, pop Culture more generally, is going to tie into the things that students are going to care about in a way that I think is going to be kind of pertinent to what we’re going to be talking about today.

So why we are doing this:

Why are we teaching it with science fiction and fantasy? Why does this matter? I’ve been teaching off and on for 13 years, I’ve been teaching philosophy, I’ve been teaching religious studies, I’ve been teaching Science, Technology and Society. And I’ve been coming to understand as I’ve gone through my teaching process that not only do I like pop culture, my students do? Because they’re people and they’re embedded in culture. So that’s kind of shocking, I guess.

But what I’ve found is that one of the things that makes students care the absolute most about the things that you’re teaching them, especially when something can be as dry as logic, or can be as perhaps nebulous or unclear at first, I say engineering cultures, is that if you give them something to latch on to something that they are already from with, they will be more interested in it. If you can show to them at the outset, “hey, you’ve already been doing this, you’ve already been thinking about this, you’ve already encountered this, they will feel less reticent to engage with it.”

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Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk ‘”Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems,’ given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, back in May 2019.

(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. ‘”Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems;’ talk given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; May 2019)

Now, I’ve got a chapter coming out about this, soon, which I can provide as a preprint draft if you ask, and can be cited as “Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design,” appearing in Philosophy And Engineering: Reimagining Technology And Social Progress. Guru Madhavan, Zachary Pirtle, and David Tomblin, eds. Forthcoming from Springer, 2019. But I wanted to get the words I said in this talk up onto some platforms where people can read them, as soon as possible, for a  couple of reasons.

First, the Current Occupants of the Oval Office have very recently taken the policy position that algorithms can’t be racist, something which they’ve done in direct response to things like Google’s Hate Speech-Detecting AI being biased against black people, and Amazon claiming that its facial recognition can identify fear, without ever accounting for, i dunno, cultural and individual differences in fear expression?

[Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.]


All these things taken together are what made me finally go ahead and get the transcript of that talk done, and posted, because these are events and policy decisions about which I a) have been speaking and writing for years, and b) have specific inputs and recommendations about, and which are, c) frankly wrongheaded, and outright hateful.

And I want to spend time on it because I think what doesn’t get through in many of our discussions is that it’s not just about how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Algorithmic instances get trained, but the processes for how and the cultural environments in which HUMANS are increasingly taught/shown/environmentally encouraged/socialized to think is the “right way” to build and train said systems.

That includes classes and instruction, it includes the institutional culture of the companies, it includes the policy landscape in which decisions about funding and get made, because that drives how people have to talk and write and think about the work they’re doing, and that constrains what they will even attempt to do or even understand.

All of this is cumulative, accreting into institutional epistemologies of algorithm creation. It is a structural and institutional problem.

So here are the Slides:

The Audio:

[Direct Link to Mp3]

And the Transcript is here below the cut:

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2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series Final Report

So, as you know, back in the summer of 2017 I participated in SRI International’s Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series. This series was an eight week program of workshops the current state of the field around, the potential future paths toward, and the moral and social implications of the notion of conscious machines. To do this, we brought together a rotating cast of dozens of researchers in AI, machine learning, psychedelics research, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, cognitive computing, neuroscience, comparative religious studies, robotics, psychology, and much more.

Image of a rectangular name card with a stylized "Technology & Consciousness" logo, at the top, the name Damien Williams in bold in the middle, and SRI International italicized at the bottom; to the right a blurry wavy image of what appears to be a tree with a person standing next to it and another tree in the background to the left., all partially mirrored in a surface at the bottom of the image.

[Image of my name card from the Technology & Consciousness workshop series.]

We traveled from Arlington, VA, to Menlo Park, CA, to Cambridge, UK, and back, and while my primary role was that of conference co-ordinator and note-taker (that place in the intro where it says I “maintained scrupulous notes?” Think 405 pages/160,656 words of notes, taken over eight 5-day weeks of meetings), I also had three separate opportunities to present: Once on interdisciplinary perspectives on minds and mindedness; then on Daoism and Machine Consciousness; and finally on a unifying view of my thoughts across all of the sessions. In relation to this report, I would draw your attention to the following passage:

An objection to this privileging of sentience is that it is anthropomorphic “meat chauvinism”: we are projecting considerations onto technology that derive from our biology. Perhaps conscious technology could have morally salient aspects distinct from sentience: the basic elements of its consciousness could be different than ours.

All of these meetings were held under the auspices of the Chatham House Rule, which meant that there were many things I couldn’t tell you about them, such as the names of the other attendees, or what exactly they said in the context of the meetings. What I was able tell you, however, was what I talked about, and I did, several times. But as of this week, I can give you even more than that.

This past Thursday, SRI released an official public report on all of the proceedings and findings from the 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series, and they have told all of the participants that they can share said report as widely as they wish. Crucially, that means that I can share it with you. You can either click this link, here, or read it directly, after the cut.

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[This paper was prepared for the 2019 Towards Conscious AI Systems Symposium co-located with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2019 Spring Symposium Series.

Much of this work derived from my final presentation at the 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series: “Science, Ethics, Epistemology, and Society: Gains for All via New Kinds of Minds”.]

Abstract. This paper explores the moral, epistemological, and legal implications of multiple different definitions and formulations of human and nonhuman consciousness. Drawing upon research from race, gender, and disability studies, including the phenomenological basis for knowledge and claims to consciousness, I discuss the history of the struggles for personhood among different groups of humans, as well as nonhuman animals, and systems. In exploring the history of personhood struggles, we have a precedent for how engagements and recognition of conscious machines are likely to progress, and, more importantly, a roadmap of pitfalls to avoid. When dealing with questions of consciousness and personhood, we are ultimately dealing with questions of power and oppression as well as knowledge and ontological status—questions which require a situated and relational understanding of the stakeholders involved. To that end, I conclude with a call and outline for how to place nuance, relationality, and contextualization before and above the systematization of rules or tests, in determining or applying labels of consciousness.

Keywords: Consciousness, Machine Consciousness, Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Bodyminds

[Overlapping images of an Octopus carrying a shell, a Mantis Shrimp on the sea floor, and a Pepper Robot]

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As you already know, we went to the second Juvet A.I. Retreat, back in September. If you want to hear several of us talk about what we got up to at the then you’re in luck because here are several conversations conducted by Ben Byford of the Machine Ethics Podcast.

I am deeply grateful to Ben Byford for asking me to sit down and talk about this with him. I talk a great deal, and am surprisingly able to (cogently?) get on almost all of my bullshit—technology and magic and the occult, nonhuman personhood, the sham of gender and race and other social constructions of expected lived categories, the invisible architecture of bias, neurodiversity, and philosophy of mind—in a rather short window of time.

So that’s definitely something…

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Kirsten and I spent the week between the 17th and the 21st of September with 18 other utterly amazing people having Chatham House Rule-governed conversations about the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

We were in Norway, in the Juvet Landscape Hotel, which is where they filmed a lot of the movie Ex Machina, and it is even more gorgeous in person. None of the rooms shown in the film share a single building space. It’s astounding as a place of both striking architectural sensibility and also natural integration as they built every structure in the winter to allow the dormancy cycles of the plants and animals to dictate when and where they could build, rather than cutting anything down.

And on our first full day here, Two Ravens flew directly over my and Kirsten’s heads.

Yes.

[Image of a rainbow rising over a bend in a river across a patchy overcast sky, with the river going between two outcropping boulders, trees in the foreground and on either bank and stretching off into the distance, and absolutely enormous mountains in the background]

I am extraordinarily grateful to Andy Budd and the other members of the Clear Left team for organizing this, and to Cennydd Bowles for opening the space for me to be able to attend, and being so forcefully enthused about the prospect of my attending that he came to me with a full set of strategies in hand to get me to this place. That kind of having someone in your corner means the world for a whole host of personal reasons, but also more general psychological and socially important ones, as well.

I am a fortunate person. I am a person who has friends and resources and a bloody-minded stubbornness that means that when I determine to do something, it will more likely than not get fucking done, for good or ill.

I am a person who has been given opportunities to be in places many people will never get to see, and have conversations with people who are often considered legends in their fields, and start projects that could very well alter the shape of the world on a massive scale.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a grandiose statement, but you’re here reading this, and so you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

I am a person who tries to pay forward what I have been given and to create as many spaces for people to have the opportunities that I have been able to have.

I am not a monetarily wealthy person, measured against my society, but my wealth and fortune are things that strike me still and make me take stock of it all and what it can mean and do, all over again, at least once a week, if not once a day, as I sit in tension with who I am, how the world perceives me, and what amazing and ridiculous things I have had, been given, and created the space to do, because and in violent spite of it all.

So when I and others come together and say we’re going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected BY the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds, then we are going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected by the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds.

So let’s talk about what that means.

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Previously, I told you about The Human Futures and Intelligent Machines Summit at Virginia Tech, and now that it’s over, I wanted to go ahead and put the full rundown of the events all in one place.

The goals for this summit were to start looking at the ways in which issues of algorithms, intelligent machine systems, human biotech, religion, surveillance, and more will intersect and affect us in the social, academic, political spheres. The big challenge in all of this was seen as getting better at dealing with this in the university and public policy sectors, in America, rather than the seeming worse we’ve gotten, so far.

Here’s the schedule. Full notes, below the cut.

Friday, June 8, 2018

  • Josh Brown on “the distinction between passive and active AI.”
  • Daylan Dufelmeier on “the potential ramifications of using advanced computing in the criminal justice arena…”
  • Mario Khreiche on the effects of automation, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the Microlabor market.
  • Aaron Nicholson on how technological systems are used to support human social outcomes, specifically through the lens of policing  in the city of Atlanta
  • Ralph Hall on “the challenges society will face if current employment and income trends persist into the future.”
  • Jacob Thebault-Spieker on “how pro-urban and pro-wealth biases manifest in online systems, and  how this likely influences the ‘education’ of AI systems.”
  • Hani Awni on the sociopolitical of excluding ‘relational’ knowledge from AI systems.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

  • Chelsea Frazier on rethinking our understandings of race, biocentrism, and intelligence in relation to planetary sustainability and in the face of increasingly rapid technological advancement.
  • Ras Michael Brown on using the religions technologies of West Africa and the West African Diaspora to reframe how we think about “hybrid humanity.”
  • Damien Williams on how best to use interdisciplinary frameworks in the creation of machine intelligence and human biotechnological interventions.
  • Sara Mattingly-Jordan on the implications of the current global landscape in AI ethics regulation.
  • Kent Myers on several ways in which the intelligence community is engaging with human aspects of AI, from surveillance to sentiment analysis.
  • Emma Stamm on the idea that datafication of the self and what about us might be uncomputable.
  • Joshua Earle on “Morphological Freedom.”

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