NEWS

Announcing new event series “Co-Opting AI: Public Conversations About Design, Inequality, and Technology”

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge is pleased to list all events that have been hosted by Mona Sloane as part of the “Co-Opting AI: Public Conversations About Design, Inequality, and Technology” series since its launch in April 2019.

Across the globe, new technologies commonly subsumed under ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) increasingly affect fundamental aspects of social life. From healthcare to transport, education, governance and work, to criminal justice and the law – AI seems to be everywhere.

At the same time, a new significance of design is emerging, gaining traction as powerful modus operandi for how we organize society. ‘Has design now displaced development as the dominant term for deliberative, transformational change?’ anthropologist Lucy Suchman pointedly asks.

But the benefits of AI design are unevenly distributed: more and more evidence is building that new algorithmic designs and AI technologies can play a central role in exacerbating social inequality across a range of domains. While many fear the arrival of the robots, the real concern is that we may miss the boat: AI prompts us to re-evaluate ‘big’ questions relating to power, democracy and inequality – and to what it means to be human. We must keep asking these questions. We must co-opt the AI discourse to address urgent social problems. If we fail to do so, we may fail humanity.

The Co-Opting AI series create a public dialogue on the big questions AI conjures up beyond the technology itself. It puts the most forward-thinking scholars across technology, design and inequality into conversation with the public and covers a wide spectrum of concerns. The events are free and open to all.


The Co-Opting AI series is convened by IPK Fellow Mona Sloane.


Image credit: Philipp N. Hertel 


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