Kate Crawford in conversation with Toby Walsh
Artificial intelligence (AI) is hard to see – but it’s already being built into the infrastructure of our core institutions, from education, business, healthcare, hiring, to the work of government itself.
Dr Kate Crawford of the AI Now Institute, and co-creator of Anatomy of an AI System sat down with Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of AI, UNSW Sydney to discuss how AI systems are already radically changing the way businesses, governments, and individuals interact with one another. Addressing the far-reaching consequences of AI – social, environmental, economic, and political – is increasingly urgent.
“At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet these assumptions are being inscribed into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed.”
– Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI System
AI has become a new extractive industry. One that is reaching into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognition and culture.
If you take a company like Facebook, and actually regulated it so it behaved well, would there be anything left?
Photo credit: Prudence Upton
This talk is a part of the UNSW Grand Challenge: Living with 21st Century Technology.
