my face

All posts tagged my face

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.

Late last month, I was at Theorizing the Web, in NYC, to moderate Panel B3, “Bot Phenomenology,” in which I was very grateful to moderate a panel of people I was very lucky to be able to bring together. Johnathan Flowers, Emma Stamm, and Robin Zebrowski were my interlocutors in a discussion about the potential nature of nonbiological phenomenology. Machine consciousness. What robots might feel.

I led them through with questions like “What do you take phenomenology to mean?” and “what do you think of the possibility of a machine having a phenomenology of its own?” We discussed different definitions of “language” and “communication” and “body,” and unfortunately didn’t have a conversation about how certain definitions of those terms mean that what would be considered language between cats would be a cat communicating via signalling to humans.

It was a really great conversation and the Live Stream video for this is here, and linked below (for now, but it may go away at some point, to be replaced by a static youtube link; when I know that that’s happened, I will update links and embeds, here).

Continue Reading

20150418_222643[1]

As most of you know from personal experience or from reading or hearing about it, it’s been a deeply intense few weeks. For me, alone, there were deaths and conference presentations and more deaths, and then more conferences.

The most recent of these deaths was my uncle– more like a brother to me– two weeks ago, and his funeral last week. I’ll talk more about the implications of that and the thoughts I’ve had in context with its timing, in a later post. For now, I want to talk about the most recent of these conferences: Theorizing The Web.

Because of the work we’ve been doing, here, I was invited to sit on a panel and have a fantastic conversation about Magick and Technology with four extremely impressive women: Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, Melissa Gira Grant, and Karen Gregory; Anna Jobin was our hashtag moderator, keeping an eye on the feed, and passing along questions, and particularly pertinent comments. Spoiler Alert: The conversation was great.

In order to know exactly HOW great, here’s our Theorizing the Web talk, “Under Its Spell: Magic, Machines, and Metaphors”:

If you enjoyed watching or listening to that, please spread it around to your friends and colleagues.

In addition to this, I was offered several really amazing opportunities, this weekend, in terms of collaboration, creation, and the disposition of things that I’ve looked at and admired for a few years now. I need to do some serious thinking on all of these things, but the offers are there, and they’re huge, and amazing.

The after party for TtW15 was at the loft space for Verso Books. The picture at the top is the view from their window. The picture below is the view from underneath a chunk of bridge, in a place that used to be known as Stabber’s Alley. It’s a wonderfully liminal space in between several connected-but-not areas of town. We spent some time down there, when we needed a break from the party. Eight, then seven, then eight again magicians and technologists and artists hanging out and talking about architecture and space and time and magic and death.

20150419_001457[1]

The rest of this weekend’s talks also all dovetailed with a number of research avenues about systematized bias and algorithmic intelligence, as well as a number of deeply magical moments of synchronicity and discussion. Click that link, and also check twitter for the hashtags #ttw15 and #a1, #b1, #c1, etc., to see the concurrent discussions. The full program listing is here.

We’ll be taking a wander down those roads, in the near future, including the start of a conversation about biased algorithmic systems of control, sometime tomorrow.

But that’s for later. For now: Enjoy. And if you do, please consider becoming a subscriber to the Patreon, and telling your friends.