Tag Archives: AI

NEW REPORT: AI and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research

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Screen Shot 2019-09-22 at 21.35.19Back in February 2019, I organised a workshop on ‘AI and Gender’, held by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, co-convened with the Ada Lovelance Institute, and supported by PwC. The workshop was trans-disciplinary and trans-sectoral. It gathered together scholars from a wide range of academic fields, including computer science, history, philosophy of science, law, politics, sociology, literature, and gender studies. In addition, it brought together researchers and practitioners from industry and research centres outside of academic, as well as key figures from UK AI governance and policy. Over the course of day, seventeen 10-minute talks created a wide and detailed picture of the cutting edge of current research and initiatives into AI and gender. They also created some agreement, some disagreement, a lot of conversation, and a quite phenomenal buzz.

We took advantage of that communal energy at the end of the day when, led by my research assistant Clementine Collett, we invited our participants to take part in a collective intelligence exercise. The challenge was to come up with at least three recommendations for new areas of research concerning AI and gender. The result was our report: ‘AI and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research‘, which develops and augments the ideas shared during this exercise by drawing on content from the workshop presentations, questions, and discussions, as well as from a broad range of wider literature and research.

The report outlines four of the weightiest challenges to gender equality presented by recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI). In tandem, it outlines four research proposals which would effectively tackle these issues. The proposals are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather, provocative. The report aspires to use these proposals as a mechanism to raise awareness, summarise the current challenges, and prompt practical action. As we continue to see rapid development of AI systems, now is the moment to address the challenges which AI presents to gender equality. It scopes and situates current research and interventions, identifies where further research and intervention is required, and acts as a call to action to tackle issues of injustice.

We launched the report at CogX 2019 with a talk by Clemi and myself, followed by a panel discussion on AI and Gender. A video recording of the Cog X events can be seen here.

AI: Fact vs Fiction with Ian McEwan and Murray Shanahan at The Barbican

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downloadI’ve been cutting back on my public work lately in order to focus more on my academic research and writing, but when the Barbican asked if I’d like to host an event on AI: Fact vs Fiction with Ian McEwan and Murray Shanahan I couldn’t say no. I’d just finished McEwan’s new novel, Machines Like Me, and have known and respected Murray for many years now.

The event was part of a range of public activities taking place around the Barbican’s AI: More Than Human exhibition, and part of McEwan’s public events promoting the publication of the new novel. The evening wasn’t focused on the novel and I’ll save my views on it, and on McEwan’s comments on SF in interview about it, for another post. Rather, that evening we were focused on exploring the history of our AI imaginings and their relation to the actual science. The podcast of the discussion is available here.

AI Narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, World Government Summit, Dubai

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This month I experienced a new country and a new downloadenvironment as I took our AI Narratives research to Dubai for the World Government Summit. I had the privilege to chair a session on underrepresented narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, hosted at the WGS. We discussed what kind of narratives dominate around AI, who is telling them, whose voices aren’t being heard and, most importantly given the purposes of the event, developed five policy recommendations in order to redress some of the inequities we’d identified. After the GGAR, I experienced the rest of the WGS, primarily attending sessions on either AI, or on women and leadership. The latter were particularly inspiring, from hearing Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of New Zealand) talk about her experiences of national leadership, to listening to Sarah Al Amiri (the UAE’s Minister of State for Advanced Sciences) share her story of scientific endeavour and leadership. It certainly did not feel natural being a humanities academic in such a policy-focused and political environment, but I was not the only one there and we all shared a common belief in the increasing importance of the presence of humanities scholars in these kinds of spaces. The benefits are reciprocal: we bring knowledge and skills that others present do not; but we also learn from interacting outside of our comfortable environments – it is challenging to one’s sense of established norms and values, but sometimes we need these to be challenged in order to reaffirm, or adjust them, in the context of an ever-changing world. 

Web We Want Festival at the Southbank Centre

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Taking place at the Southbank Centre in London over the weekend of Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st May, the Web We Want festival dives into the wonderful world of the web with a packed weekend of technology, digital art, talks, exhibitions and creative workshops. I’ll be there on the Saturday chairing a panel on ‘When Science Fiction Becomes Reality: AI in the Digital Age‘. Organised by the ANXS Collective, who specialise in public engagement in Art and Science, the panel features scientist Professor Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and recently scientific advisor to the film Ex_Machina, alongside artist and fellow SF-lover Richard Adams, and filmmaker Khalil Sullins. Khalil’s debut feature film, the sci-fi thriller Listening, was released in 2014 and has its international premiere at the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival after our Web We Want Panel – so why not make a weekend of it!