Co-Opting AI: Ideology
To view the event, please click here.
RSVP is required. Please RSVP here.
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and the 370 Jay Project invite you to a discussion on games in the series “Co-Opting AI.”
Quests for innovation, particularly technological innovation, seem to always be closely tied to different systems of ideas and ideals. Artificial intelligence in particular is bound up in narratives and theories of progress, prosperity, and the superiority of the human race. Many of these ideologies influence public policy and even geopolitical relations. The “Co-Opting AI: Ideology” event sets out to examine how these ideals fuel the rise of AI, how they are bound up in histories of rule making, counting, and bureaucracy, how they are built on Western ontologies and perpetuate Western power structures.
Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Assistant Professor with The Information School at the University of Washington. Her writing on data, technology, and ethics has appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication, & Society, The Library Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Sabelo Mhlambi is a researcher at the Berkman-Klein Center and Carr Center for Human Rights whose work focuses on the intersection of human rights, ethics, and technology. In particular, Mhlambi’s research examines the human rights implications of algorithmic technology and proposes a new ethical framework for governing the creation and use of AI for maximizing public good. Mhlambi’s work expands on the conversation around ethics and AI by introducing non-Western frameworks for examining the effects of automated decision-making technology. Mhlambi’s work is also supplemented by more than a decade building large-scale software, open-source software, and content recommendation systems.
Ahmed Ansari is an Industry Assistant Professor in the Integrated Digital Media program at NYU Tandon. His work and research situates itself at the intersection of design studies, critical cultural studies, and the philosophy of technology, with interests in decolonising knowledge production in design and thinking around how technologies can intertwine with and develop through non-Anglo-Eurocentric knowledge systems and cosmologies. His area focus lies in South Asian cosmologies and practices and the history and philosophy of technology in the Indian subcontinent. He also works as an educational consultant for universities and has developed curricula for design programs in his home country, Pakistan.
Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on inequality in the context of AI design and policy. She frequently publishes and speaks about AI, ethics, equitability and policy in a global context. Mona is a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK), where she convenes the Co-Opting AI series and co-curates the The Shift series. She also is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, and is part of the inaugural cohort of the Future Imagination Collaboratory (FIC) Fellows at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Mona is the technology editor of Public Books, and is a fellow at The GovLab. Her most recent project is Terra Incognita: Mapping NYC’s New Digital Public Spaces in the COVID-19 Outbreak which she leads as principal investigator. Mona currently also serves as principal investigator of the Procurement Roundtables project, a collaboration with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury (Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency & Accountability at Twitter, Founder of Parity), and John C. Havens (IEEE Standards Association) that is focused on innovating AI procurement to center equity and justice. Mona also works with Emmy Award-winning journalist and NYU journalism professor Hilke Schellmann on hiring algorithms, auditing, and new tools for investigative journalism and research on AI. With Dr. Matt Statler (NYU Stern), Mona is also leading the Public Interest Technology Convention and Career Fair project that looks to bring together students and organizations building up the public interest technology space. Mona is also affiliated with the Tübingen AI Center in Germany where she leads a 3-year federally funded research project on the operationalization of ethics in German AI startups. She has written for The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, OneZero Medium, and other outlets. Mona holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has completed fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Cape Town. Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.
Photo credit: Michael Dziedzic
