Who’s Afraid of AI? Myths and Realities of Generative AI
Kate Crawford
Research Professor, USC Annenberg School, Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, Honorary Professor, University of Sydney
Abstract: There has been a spike in concern about existential risk from artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This fear, commonly associated with terms such as “X-risk,” and “the singularity,” focuses on the hypothetical possibility of creating a machine intelligence that will ultimately overthrow or eliminate the human race. But the loudest alarmists about existential risk are also the architects of the technology they warn against. By sustaining this paradox, they are reaping unprecedented financial investment and political power. In the shadow of this imagined risk, a slowly-unfolding reality is being lost: how actually-existing AI is already causing lasting harm to the environment, human populations, and social institutions. In this talk, Prof. Crawford will address the material impacts of actually-existing AI across three domains: ecological, economic, and electoral.
Bio: Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR in New York, an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her latest book, Atlas of AI (Yale, 2021) won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the ASSI&T Best Information Science Book Award, and was named one of the best books in 2021 by New Scientist and the Financial Times. Over her twenty-year research career, she has also produced groundbreaking creative collaborations and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A in London, and was awarded with the Design of the Year Award in 2019 and included in the Design of the Decades by the Design Museum of London. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. She has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament, and she currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning. She was named on the TIME100 list as one of the most influential people in AI. Her latest exhibition, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 1500-2025, opened in Milan this month.