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Avery Slater, The Golem and the Game of Automation

Norbert Wiener, a foundational force in cybernetics and information theory, often used the allegory of the Golem to represent the ethical complexities inherent in machine learning. Recent advances in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) deal explicitly with problems laid out by Wiener’s earlier writings, including the importance of games as learning environments for the development of AI agents. This talk explores issues from contemporary machine learning that express Wiener’s prescient notion of developing a “significant game” between creator and machine.

▶️ Video of Lecture

Avery Slater, The Golem and the Game of Automation (Ethics of AI in Context)

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?

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, The Golem and the Game of Automation (Ethics of AI in Context)

Ethics of AI in Context

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