HS2024 Lecture 12: Creative Democracy in the Age of AI PDF

Welcome to the last lecture! Please complete the Course Evaluation (via link in your email) & the EduApp survey  Artificial Intelligence Digital Ethics and & Human Politics Values Fall 2024, ETH Zürich / Prof. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin Lesson 12: Creative...

Welcome to the last lecture! Please complete the Course Evaluation (via link in your email) & the EduApp survey  Artificial Intelligence Digital Ethics and & Human Politics Values Fall 2024, ETH Zürich / Prof. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin Lesson 12: Creative Democracy in the Age of AI  Animating Questions How can democracies be vibrant in advanced technological societies? What does critical and constructive thinking about AI and society contribute to democracy? What difference does education make and what might need to change in education to realize this goal? Our semester …Why end with democracy? Getting situated AIxKnowledges AIxWorlds AIxFutures John Dewey and John Law from Lesson 2 Dewey, "Creative Democracy–The Task Before Us" (1939) Speaks against complacency towards democracy, the habit to think democracy as "something institutional and external" Calls to treat democracy as an individual and personal way of life; cultivated and evidenced in daily interactions and attitudes towards one another Praises the freedom to gather, to exchange experiences, to learn from one another as the source of common democratic knowledge for how to act Law, "Heterogeneous Engineering and Tinkering" (2011) Sees how engineering catastrophes result when attention to the "social" is an "afterthought" to technical decision Calls for "tinkering" (incremental steps towards reliability and sustainability) and for a new profession of "heterogeneous engineers" capable of understanding "technical relations, social relations, and natural relations" (5). Awareness of bias Bias as inclination, towards/away from which norm? Who decides? (if you'd like to learn more about definitions of fairness, Arvind Narayanan, "Tutorial: 21 definitions of fairness and their politics" (ACM FAccT 2018) Thinking beyond the "technical fix" Technology as world-making. Ask: - How is the world being configured? - What world wo we want to live in?  Slide from Lecture 2 Understanding technology in this class Technologies are more than inanimate tools Technologies are more than large interconnected systems for getting things done Technologies have transformative potential: redraw the boundaries between self and other, nature and artifice; affect identity, autonomy, relationships, forms of collective life Technologies as world-making Slide from Lecture 10 "Across the board, we have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good" Zuckerberg testimony in Senate, April 10, 2018. Ethical questions: How do data technologies contribute to or detract from the "good"? How is the "good" re-defined with the technology? The "good" is at stake in discussions about privacy, influence, democracy, regulation of technologies.. Transparency Justice/Fairness/Equity "...ethics as the Non-maleficence inescapably political Responsibility and Accountability formation of the Privacy relation of oneself to Beneficence Freedom and Autonomy What is oneself and to others" Trust Sustainability ethics? Dignity – Louis Amoore, Solidarity Cloud Ethics, p. 7 Jobin et al., 2019 Street art, Chartres, France. Image: MBL 2021. "Contemporary algorithms are not so much transgressing settled societal norms as establishing new patterns of good and bad, new thresholds of normality and abnormality, against which actions are calibrated" -- Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others, p.6.  How do technologies How can alliances of inform how we technology and the good be understand transformed or resisted? what is good? What visions of the good are "in" a technology? Tech Good How do ideas of the good influence the technologies we create or how we decide to use them? Resources for the road ahead Attention! What are the authors we read paying attention to? Why? How do they bring it up? Make it visible to us? → Ask: What do they see? What can I learn? (Not first: What do I think?) Creative Democracy in Action  "No Tech for Genocide" "Your Algorithm Doesn't Know Me" Tages Anzeiger, May 7, 2024 The Guardian, August 17, 2020 Staffnet ETHZ, May 8, 2024 At the station, Anirudh Saxena, a tall man in his early 30s with a pencil mustache, stopped and looked Mr. Tripathi straight in the eyes. “Sir, why are you doing this every week?” Mr. Saxena asked. “Read this,” Mr. Tripathi told Mr. Saxena, handing him a small 10-page booklet. “This explains why we should read books and understand history instead of reading WhatsApp garbage and extracting pleasure out of someone’s pain.” Mr. Saxena smiled, nodded his head and put the booklet in his handbag before disappearing into the crowd. If just 10 out of a thousand people read his materials, Mr. Tripathi said, his job is done. “When truth becomes the casualty, you can only fight it on the streets,” he said. NYTimes, May 28, 2024 Screenshot, Theatreneumarkt.ch "Subversion of Indigenous Knowledge and African Cultural Heritage: AI systems risk appropriating and misrepresenting indigenous knowledge, potentially eroding cultural heritage and perpetuating cultural exploitation. Additionally, inadequate representation of indigenous practices in AI models may lead to the marginalisation of indigenous communities and their knowledge systems that have always been part and parcel of African norms and values." African Continental AI Strategy, July 2024 Maori Data Sovereignty Network Devidal, Humanitarian Law and Policy, ICRC, February 2, 2023 Datenschutzbeauftragte des Kantons Zürich "A question posed to our societies is that of their adequacy of knowledge and of response" Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, 2021, p. 27 Creative democracy as a way of life today requires collective understanding of the relationship of knowledge, technology and society. Creative Democracy in Action What will you take forward?  o w if yo u 'd li ke to h e ar If you'd like more… Let us kn ! about upcoming events FS 2025 Courses: "AI Personhood, Social Justice, and Cross-Cultural Dialogues in the Digital Age," Dr. Kebene Wodajo "Science, Trust, and Politics," Dr. Gabriel Dorthe “Foundations of Science, Technology and Society,” M. Boenig-Liptsin and B. Baptista-Vienni