Sonya Katyal, Trevor Paglen, and Ken Goldberg in conversation with Kate Crawford
BCNM's Sonya Katyal, Trevor Paglen, and Ken Goldberg recently featured on "Excavating 'Ground Truth' in AI: Epistemologies and Politics in Training Data" to comment on Kate Crawford's lecture on her latest book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. In the seminar discussion, panelists speak on the hidden truths behind the technologies that make our lives so efficient and easy today.
From the discussion:
Trevor: I think there's something to learn from that in terms of not only thinking about who is in the room, but I guess just thinking like in a deep way about the historicial context and even like context that are perhaps even deeper than the framework in which you're posing the question about the ethics and artifical intelligence... So I guess a question for Ken is, is basic reseach possible given all the things we've talked about here and kind of what is the pedagogy, what is that distinction between basic research in physics versus sociological tinkering what have you?
Ken: Thank you Trevor. And what I want to note is I was struck by the term eigencapital, and it's very interesting because it references the idea of eigenvectors and principle component analysis, and this was really the root of very early classification. That was very much in line with what Marion said about algorithims allocate and the very terrible history of the IQ. And the idea of the IQ was to use dimensionality reduction to find these dimensions and to be able to score people along these with the assumption that there was one sort of metric of intelligence. There was this singular idea that everyone could be ranked on a scale, a linear scale of intelligence...
Watch the entire discussion here!