Followed by conversations with Director Satinder Garcha

Co-sponsored by Chennai International Center.

Abstract:
While many scan the foreseeable time horizon looking for killer robots with glowing eyes, or for amorphous superintelligent puppet masters, humanity has been quietly augmenting itself with artificial intelligence for decades if not centuries. To understand the long-term consequences of AI we need first to better examine our present. Here in joint work with Aylin Caliskan-Islam and Arvind Narayanan I show that human-like semantic biases are present in standard the standard NLP tools GloVe and word2vec applied to their standard Web-sourced corpora. We have replicated a spectrum of standard human biases as exposed by the Implicit Association Test and other well-known psychological studies. Our results indicate that language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. These regularities are captured by machine learning along with the rest of semantics. I will describe these results, and also their implications both for human and AI ethics, which I will argue should be considered as one.
Bio:
Joanna Bryson is a Reader (tenured Associate Professor) at the University of Bath, currently visiting Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She has broad academic interests in the structure and utility of intelligence, both natural and artificial. She is best known for her work in systems AI and AI ethics, both of which she began during her PhD in the 1990s, but she and her colleagues publish broadly, into biology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cognitive science, and politics. She is currently collaborating on a project funded by Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, “Public Goods and Artificial Intelligence”, with Alin Coman of Princeton Psychology and Mark Riedl of Georgia Tech. This project includes both basic research in human sociality and experiments in technological interventions. Other current research includes work on understanding the causality behind the link between wealth inequality and political polarization, work on transparency in AI systems, and work on machine prejudice deriving from human semantics. She holds degrees in Psychology from Chicago and Edinburgh, and in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh and MIT. At Bath she founded the Intelligent Systems research group (one of four in the Department of Computer Science) and heads their Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence.Sponsor(s): MIT Media Lab Scalable Cooperation Group 

Sponsored by Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)

Click here to register.

In partnership with The Project for STEM Foundation Competitiveness

Co-sponsored by Resident Scholars @ MIT Simmons Hall, MIT ORL and Prajnopaya.

In 1991, Shaka Senghor was sent to prison for second-degree murder. Today, he is a lecturer at universities, a leading voice on criminal justice reform, and an inspiration to thousands.
In life, it’s not how you start that matters. It’s how you finish.
Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age 11, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and the beatings from his mother worsened, sending him on a downward spiral that saw him run away from home, turn to drug dealing to survive, and end up in prison for murder at the age of 19, fuming with anger and despair.
Writing My Wrongs is the story of what came next. During his nineteen-year incarceration, seven of which were spent in solitary confinement, Senghor discovered literature, meditation, self-examination, and the kindness of others—tools he used to confront the demons of his past, forgive the people who hurt him, and begin atoning for the wrongs he had committed. Upon his release at age thirty-eight, Senghor became an activist and mentor to young men and women facing circumstances like his. His work in the community and the courage to share his story led him to fellowships at the MIT Media Lab and the Kellogg Foundation and invitations to speak at events like TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
In equal turns, Writing My Wrongs is a page-turning portrait of life in the shadow of poverty, violence, and fear; an unforgettable story of redemption, reminding us that our worst deeds don’t define us; and a compelling witness to our country’s need for rethinking its approach to crime, prison, and the men and women sent there.