ADM Talk: Mapping AI ethics

Talk by David Moats, Linköping University.

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in the social consequences of AI and autonomous systems, often under the banner of AI Ethics. This has resulted in numerous public statements and frameworks for “fair”, “accountable” or “ethical” AI made by tech companies and governments and increasing calls for collaborations between computer science and social science / humanistic disciplines. It is not clear, however, if these new frameworks have teeth and if these collaborations are meaningful or merely tokenistic: a case of “ethics washing”. 

This talk reports on an ongoing project with CWTS, Leiden University (involving computer scientists, an anthropologist, an ethicist and a science policy advisor), which employs a mix of scientometric tools, interviews and focus groups in order to map these discussions across scientific papers and policy documents. In particular, I will reflect on the perils and politics of trying to define the boundaries of AI Ethics in the first place and what our own interdisciplinary struggles working with data can teach us about disciplinary relations in this new terrain.

When and where

Thursday 12. November 14-15 on Zoom: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/64022555472?pwd=SEtEeEZ0WjdFdC9GN0dZcGJtZDVWUT09

Bio

David Moats is a Research Fellow at TEMA T (Technology and Social Change), Linköping University, Sweden, and his background is in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies. His research is mainly about digitization and the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in various industries including healthcare, journalism, politics and academia. He also writes about the methodological implications of these new sources of digital data and frequently works with computer scientists and designers to develop new tools, particularly data visualizations, for social research.