When the internet is in everything, its problems are everywhere.
Tag: Data
“We Don’t Want the Program”: Jill Lepore on How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy
“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”
Episode 3: Societies Online
What kind of social space are we inhabiting when we’re online? How do practices like data collection, data brokering, and surveillance underwrite the “free” services we enjoy?
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?
Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning
Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time?
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 …
