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. But what actually is “artificial intelligence,” particularly when it’s deployed in our homes and workplaces? Encased in sleek consumer products like the Amazon Echo, we rarely consider the vast underlying network of data collection, exploitation of human labor, and physical resource extraction. All have enormous implications for society and the environment.
Dr Kate Crawford of the AI Now Institute, and co-creator of Anatomy of an AI System, will deliver the annual Wallace Wurth Lecture on the wider system of extraction that makes artificial intelligence systems work. 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
This event was chaired by Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of AI, UNSW Sydney and was presented by the UNSW Centre for Ideas and is a part of the UNSW Grand Challenge: Living with 21st Century Technology.