Panel talk: Prototyping AI ethics futures—Rights, access and refusal

Pan­el talk at 1:00pm–2:30pm, 23 June 2021 (BST), in asso­ci­a­tion with Ada Lovelace Insti­tute, The British Acad­e­my and The Arts and Human­i­ties Research coun­cil.

Interview with Nora Young on CBC Radio Spark Show

I was inter­viewed just over a week ago by Nora Young, for the great Spark pro­gramme, aired on CBC Radio One.
In short, I try to give Nora a sense of how AI could open up some rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties if we were able to approach intel­li­gence dif­fer­ent­ly. I try to cap­ture how we might see intel­li­gence not in restric­tive human terms (as sta­ble cog­ni­tive capac­i­ties in the head/mind), but as some­thing always emer­gent, always enact­ed and tied to the many unfold­ing rela­tions we find our­selves entan­gled in. I see this to be a gen­er­a­tive ori­en­ta­tion to AI, build­ing on ideas from Don­na Har­away, Isabelle Stengers, Vin­ciane Despret, Sarah What­more and many oth­ers grap­pling with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of us extend­ing our capa­bil­i­ties, of being some­how more-than-human.
If you’re in Cana­da, the pro­gramme is broad­cast this com­ing Sun­day after­noon at 1:05 PM local time (in most parts of Cana­da) and again on Wednes­day at 2:05 PM. Alter­na­tive­ly, my seg­ment of the show is avail­able here, titled:

I want to give a spe­cial thanks to Mar­cus Carter and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne’s Social NUI Cen­tre for allow­ing me to share their amaz­ing work with Orang­utans.

Artificial Intelligence: asking the right questions

Nes­ta kind­ly invit­ed me to one of their ‘hot top­ics’ events a cou­ple of weeks ago to present a provo­ca­tion on AI and human-com­put­er inter­ac­tion. They also asked for me to write a few words that they’ve now pub­lished on the “TheLong+Short” blog here. I append the orig­i­nal text to my provo­ca­tion below.
I came across this pho­to on my com­put­er today (sor­ry, I’ve looked to see if I can attribute it to some­one, but so far failed). It’s a love­ly image in it’s own right, play­ing with a vin­tage qual­i­ty to the future, but in this con­text I think it does invite the ques­tion ‘is this the lim­it of our imag­i­na­tions?’ I’d like to sug­gest AI might open us up to so much more. (more…)