Shakespeare’s enduring influence, his facility with language, and his empathic depiction of the human experience contribute not only to our sense of his genius, but make him an irresistible subject for artificial intelligence researchers.
Artificial intelligence has transformed what we can learn and decipher from the brain. Are we mistaken to refer to our personal information as “ours” or to claim individual privacy rights to those multifarious details being scooped up by data miners and aggregators? Might there be better, more apt ways to think about individual privacy and personal information—perhaps as collective or public goods?
If human beings are creating artificial intelligence that influences the future, who determines which of us get to imagine that future? Whose voices will be heard, and whose imagination and vision will be realized? Films discussed include The Black Baptism, Coded Bias, Dirty Computer, and Her.
Do we believe digital employees will become indistinguishable from human employees this decade? As democratization of AI leads to proliferation of such digital agents, how should we prepare for humans to continue to be in command? When questioning if morality can be built into computers, we must simultaneously ask: whose morality? Could there be a successful deep learning AI that answers moral dilemmas? Or is there reason to think that matters are different in the case of morality?
Chetan Dube envisions a world where humans and machines work closely together to build a radically more efficient planet. His research has focused on deep AI, and he pioneered the use of AI-enabled digital labor across industries. Amelia’s brain uses episodic memory, process memory, intent recognition, and emotional intelligence to respond to complex queries, process transactions, and deliver personalized customer service. Amelia stores facts, concepts, and the associations between them in her semantic memory. From standard operating procedures (SOPs) to policy documents, she can be trained to apply them to conversations.
Can AI have emotions, can machine learning models truly learn? Can AI systems be used to improve human moral judgments? How might collaboration between humanists and technologists produce more rigorous forms of learning and verification? These and other questions are the subject of a lively exchange between panelists Wendy Chun, Sebastian Liao, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.
In her keynote address, Wendy Chun discusses how artificial intelligence reproduces and exacerbates ideologies about identity and contributes to the increasingly fractious politics of the twenty-first century. A leading thinker on the influence of new technologies, Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University. She also leads the university’s Digital Democracies Institute, whose purpose is to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation.
With the prevalence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, it’s natural to ask, “What will be the future of art in an AI-driven society?” This question becomes even more relevant as AI increasingly appears in the creative domain. Across human history, artists have always integrated new technologies into their practice—from oil paint and printmaking in the Renaissance to photography, motion pictures, and computer animation in the modern era. In this panel discussion, artists Ahmed Elgammal and Carla Gannis talk about their work, created with AI technologies, and how their relationships with AI inform their creative processes.
April 7–22, 2021 | Artificial intelligence has infiltrated our daily lives—in the ways we conduct business, govern, provide healthcare and security, and communicate. The large-scale cultural and societal implications of these changes—and the ethical questions they raise—pose a serious challenge as we embrace a future increasingly shaped by the implementation of AI technology. In Our Image included a series of virtual events—presentations, conversations, webinars, film screenings, and an art exhibition—highlighting perspectives from leading humanists, scientists, engineers, artists, writers, and software company executives collectively advancing inquiry into key emerging questions.
What are the reasonable boundaries and expectations that students should expect from their mentors? And what obligations are owed to those who share their knowledge and experience? Looking at traditions from the ancient world to the modern era, these three scholars will discuss the nature of mentorship in different cultural contexts and how the concept of mentorship continues to resonate in contemporary classrooms.