▶ Video of Lecture

Avery Slater, The Golem and the Game of Automation

The Ethics of Remote Fieldwork in a Pandemic: Some Reflections on Performances in a Zoom Room

In this episode, Aden interviews Kristen Csenkey,  is a PhD in Global Governance Candidate at the Balsillie School of International Affairs through Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She is a Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI). Kristen was the 2020 Women in Defence and Security (WiDS) Fellowship recipient and a Women in International Security (WIIS) Canada Emerging Thought Leader in Digital Security. You can find her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/KCsenkey, as well as some of her work on linktr.ee at: linktr.ee/KristenCsenkey.

Ethics of Research (Ep. 5): Kristen Csenkey

What’s the difference between merely being offensive and being unethical? When does a joke go too far? Open Questions is a production of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. The music is written and performed by Markku Wainman.

Why Is It Okay to Make Fun of Elites?

Two centuries of dystopian thought consistently imagined how technologies “out of control” can threaten humanity: with obsolescence at best, with violent systemic destruction at worst. Yet current advances in neural networked machine learning herald the advent of a new ethical question for this established history of critique. If a genuinely conscious form of artificial intelligence arises, it will be wired from its inception as guided by certain incentives, one of which might eventually be its own self-preservation. How can the tradition of philosophical ethics approach this emerging form of intelligence? How might we anticipate the ethical crisis that emerges when machines we cannot turn off cross the existential threshold, becoming beings we should not turn off?

Avery Slater
University of Toronto
Department of English

▶️ Video of Lecture

Avery Slater, Kill Switch: The Ethics of the Halting Problem

Machine learning systems are implemented by all the big tech companies in everything from ad auctions to photo-tagging, and are supplementing or replacing human decision making in a host of more mundane, but possibly more consequential, areas like loans, bail, policing, and hiring. And we’ve already seen plenty of dangerous failures; from risk assessment tools systematically rating black arrestees as riskier than white ones, to hiring algorithms that learned to reject women. There’s a broad consensus across industry, academe, government, and civil society that there is a problem here, one that presents a deep challenge to core democratic values, but there is much debate over what kind of problem it is and how it might be solved. Taking a sociological approach to the current boom in ethical AI and machine learning initiatives that promise to save us from the machines, this talk explores how this problem becomes a problem, for whom, and with what solutions.

Video of Lecture

How Ethics of AI Became a Problem (feat. Daniel Greene)

A selection of interviews and talks exploring the normative dimensions of AI and related technologies in individual and public life, brought to you by the interdisciplinary Ethics of AI Lab at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto.

Avery Slater, Kill Switch: The Ethics of the Halting Problem

Ethics of AI in Context

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