Lecture on June 8, 2022
The AI Mirror: Reclaiming our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
Prof. Dr. Shannon Vallor (University of Edinburgh, UK)
About the lecture [stream]
In the coming decades, the spread of commercially viable artificial intelligence is projected to transform virtually every sociotechnical system, from finance and transportation to healthcare and warfare. In recent years, work in the new interdisciplinary field of AI ethics has revealed to extent to which AI systems are prone to reflect back and amplify human vices, especially our unfair biases and discriminatory behaviours but also our penchant for spreading and consuming misinformation. While this is true, the way in which AI functions as a mirror can convey the misleading and dangerous impression that AI merely captures and replicates our humanity in machine form. Yet we all recognize that a mirror does not capture the embodied human form. Mirrors erase and occlude much of our material presence; mirror images have no smell, no depth, no softness, no interiority. What does the AI mirror erase from us, and how can we reclaim it? In this talk I will explore the dimensions of our humanity that today’s AI revolution is making it harder for us to see in ourselves and in one another, and what we can do to bring these vital aspects of our humanity back into view.
About the speaker
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence and Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also Professor in Philosophy. Professor Vallor's research explores how AI, robotics and other new technologies reshape human character. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and a former Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google. She is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (OUP 2016) and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology.
photo credit: Shannon Vallor
Wednesday, 8. June 2022, 18:15-19:45 (CEST)
Address for joining us on-site:
Flügelbau West, 2. OG, Raum W221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg