Tag
Data
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Who Gets Guggenheims?
Unfortunately, 100 years of data show that those whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—that is, those not at elite institutions—are least likely to receive them.
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Episode 1: Origins of the Internet
Where did the internet come from? Who gets left out of dominant stories about its origins? And what can history teach us about how to make the internet better?
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Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning
Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time?
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Understanding Race with AI
Racial categories are, by definition, unequal categories. They reflect not universal truths but historical processes that have linked racial status to …
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Designing AI with Justice
I will discuss three concepts in this talk: first, the idea of design justice; second, how people are already resisting oppressive AI; and third, the ten principles of design justice …
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Can Fair Use Make for Fairer AI?
Artificial intelligence has a copyright problem, and this problem is deeply related to questions of ethics and justice. Increasingly, AI is adopted by our banks …
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Against Human Capital
My parents were on the brink of retirement at the same time as I was researching pension strategies in Israel. So, I couldn’t help thinking about them whenever retirees were discussed. It made things difficult for me, because every insurance agent and pension-fund manager I’d interviewed circled back to the same point: people were living…
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Machine Learning Is a Co-opting Machine
We are using human activity as an example from which to learn, and that becomes the basis upon which we then develop automated solutions to all sorts of …
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Why an Age of Machine Learning Needs the Humanities
It isn’t easy to be a citizen in 2018. We are told to watch out for bots and biased …
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“What Invisibility Looks Like”
Richard S. Leghorn, the Pentagon official who coined the phrase “Information Age,” in 1960, never thought it would catch on. More than half a century later, no …
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Weeding Our Algorithmic Gardens
I’m usually not very worried about robots taking over the world. Skynet makes for entertaining science fiction, but the artificial intelligences we have now don’t …
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Focus Groups and Voting Booths
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however …
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The Stanford Literary Lab’s Narrative
Seven years ago, in a small room at the top of a winding stair in Palo Alto, a strange experiment got underway. A group of literary critics began to build a laboratory. Labs themselves are not unusual on university campuses, but in 2010 it was far from clear what a group of critics would do…
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The World Silicon Valley Made
A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver and his fingernails, he pieces it all together to produce a tiny talisman capable of channeling the world’s intelligence. To consumers, the iPhone can seem hermetic, consummate,…
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Our Metrics, Ourselves
In 1994, a doctor named Clifton Meador penned a satirical portrait of “the last well person” for the New England Journal of Medicine. The protagonist, bent on discovering every datum of unwellness …
