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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?

It takes time for the norms of democratic debate to adjust to new technologies – in some cases, too much time. In parts of Europe in the 1920s and 30s, change brought on by the new technology of radio outran democratic adaptation. Rini will argue that we are now at a similar inflection point with social media. Healthy democratic debate requires that we view fellow citizens as typically sincere and thoughtful when they express disagreement. Rini identifies several features of social media discourse that have rapidly undermined this presumption and weakened the authority of democratic norms. What can be done about these shifts? Rini argues that state and consumer solutions are unlikely to work. Our best hope is for social media platforms to create infrastructure enabling citizens to detect insincerity and carelessness in discourse.

Regina Rini
York University
Philosophy

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Regina Rini, Democracy and Social Media are Incompatible: Now What?

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.

Regina Rini, Democracy and Social Media are Incompatible: Now What?

Ethics of AI in Context

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