Ruha Benjamin, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, will give an Obert C. Tanner Lecture on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values this month. Professor Benjamin is Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
The event, organised by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Clare Hall, will take place on 18 October at Robinson Auditorium, and includes a short welcome, the lecture, and then an intermission followed by two respondents and a final Q&A discussion with all speakers.
Lecture outline:
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Professor Ruha Benjamin examines biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight. She also considers how race itself is a tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice, and challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
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