Join the Critical Tech Talk series to hear guest speaker Kari Zacharias discuss how engineers can work towards responsibility, sustainability, and equity in design by practicing humility as respect of other ways of knowing, doing, being, and making.
Lecture
Join us for an urgent discussion on "surveillance capitalism", its threat to our information civilization, and how its trajectory undermines democratic norms and the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.
This discussion of ethical decision making when building technologies in a ‘Good Way’ includes two examples. First, I illustrate how the protocol for building a Lakota sweat lodge can act as a framework for building a physical computing device. Next, I provide an example of how multiple streams of protocol are necessary to build an AI system as a confluence of ethics. Some ideas proposed here are not currently possible, some are possible if investment is made in the necessary research, and some are possible but only through a radical change in the way technology companies are run and the pyramid of compensation for the exploitation of resources is reversed.
Join via this Zoom link, passcode 756099.
BIO:
Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies.
Much of the contemporary research on race in communication media studies begins with media representations. However, for this talk, Armond R. Towns will focus on the relationship between the modern research university, race, and the development of communication and media studies in the early and mid-twentieth century, with a focus specifically on US and Canadian communication and media studies. Like the modern university, the discipline of communication and media studies, Towns argues, has a difficulty with understanding non-Western life. This talk is a beginning conversation on how to push toward new forms of understanding humanity beyond Western life. The topic of who counts as human is crucial in a context where big tech aims to control the future of so-called humanity and the AI race closes the gap between human and machine communications.
This is a hybrid event and may be attended in-person or online.
The climate crisis calls for a massive and speedy transition away from fossil fuels towards energy systems based on renewable, clean sources like the sun, the wind and the tides. But to date, what we’re seeing is a move towards extractive, large-scale, corporate-owned for-profit models of green energy. These so-called solutions are replicating the social and environmental injustices perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry, including the rampant violation of Indigenous Rights and desecration of their lands and waters .
Upholding indigenous rights and fighting for a climate just future for all requires not just a change in energy sources, but a transformation in the very systems of power, governance, worldviews and values that have driven the climate crisis. In this talk Eriel Deranger and Jen Gobby will share their own visions for what this transformation can look like and open up a discussion about how these visions can inspire and ground the work of those in the tech and innovation world.
We are pleased to announce the fifth installment of our Critical Tech Talk series featuring Dr. Claire Horn speaking on "Artificial Wombs: The Disobedient Future of Birth" on Monday March 13, 2023 at 5pm ET. This will be a fully virtual event with Dr.
In 2002, Ghyslain Raza made a fun video of himself playing a Star Wars character. Later the video was posted on the internet without his consent.
It became the first viral video, with enormous consequences for Raza.
In 2022, Raza broke his silence to speak about his experience and reflect on its meaning today.
Join us in E5 6004 @ 7pm on Feb. 15 to watch this documentary as Raza revisits "The Star Wars Kid."
Free admittance! Free popcorn!
Join us on October 28 at 4pm, in-person or virtually via livestream, for Critical Tech Talk 4: Batya Friedman!
Artificial intelligence will take your job! Genetic engineering will accelerate the loss of biodiversity! The modern smart-city is a privacy disaster! Killer robots and technological progress are out of control! Is the techno-apocalypse upon us? Should we run for the exit? Or are there more nuanced ways to understand the complex interaction between technology and society and values?