Top 9 Learning Moments
- Impact of emerging technologies on the community will always be more important than the intention behind developing the technology. A positive intention won’t outweigh a negative impact. — Luke Stark
- The National Integrated Identity Management System (NIMS) was introduced in Kenya intended to replace the manual ID system, a legacy of Kenya’s colonial occupation by the British.
- The rollout of NIMS was met with resistance due to the wide array of personal information collected, short period for registration, systematic exclusion of certain ethnic groups, and a lack of public consultation about how the system should work.
- People often associate AI with stats or mathematics, and people often think whatever your model does or whatever your data set it just represents reality in a neutral and objective way. — Abeba Birhane
- The Internet is really not just reality, it’s just a portion of reality, as seen by a really specific perspective, from a certain political, cultural and personal background and view. — Abeba Birhane
- Ultimately, the Kenyan government system did not break away completely from the colonial logic of oppression and exclusion … The political construction of ethnicity in Kenya does not reflect the lived reality of most Kenyans. On a day-to-day basis most Kenyans will move fluidly between different aspects of identity, but here comes the ID system telling us that you can only be one thing, and that thing is something that is determined by your father. And, not even by your mother, and not even by any other ways of thinking about religion, all of these ideas again are about a certain vision of what government is for. — Nanjala Nyabola
- Ultimately, governance is about a balance of power between citizens, and using citizens in the broader sense of the word, not necessarily constraining to people who belong to a specific political entity, but it’s about individuals who have civic and political rights and it’s about balancing those civic political rights obligations with the power that the government has over those people. — Nanjala Nyabola
- Democratizing AI has, in itself, a huge number of challenges, because the kind of computing resources needed to compete in the commercial AI space are available to very few corporations or research labs, and so those corporations and research labs that are also engaged in a sort of intellectual property race and war. — Noopur Raval
- It definitely also ties back to an enduring problem with the Internet in terms of how traditionally the knowledge layers on which the cultural memory of the Internet that we seem to be drawing on and building on is already so flawed and has has relied on or has sort of been representative of where Internet access has been more prevalent, who’s had also economies of leisure and economies of time. … We talk about how sexist and white and privileged the internet is, in itself, but I feel like it’s, not just because of a certain kind of participation or bodies that participate, but it’s a historical kind of economy of time and leisure. — Noopur Raval
Interested in learning more?
This series is hosted by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame’s online learning community that connects you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on everything from faith and politics to science, technology, and your career.
Featured Speakers
Kirsten Martin, Director, Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center; William P. and Hazel B. White Center Professor of Technology Ethics; Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Elizabeth M. Renieris, Professor of the Practice; Founding Director, Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab
Luke Stark, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
Yussuf Bashir, Executive Director, Haki na Sheria
Nanjala Nyabola, Independent Writer and Researcher, Nairobi, Kenya
Abeba Birhane, PhD Candidate in Cognitive Science, University College Dublin
Noopur Raval, Postdoctoral Researcher, AI Now Institute
Vanessa Perry, MBA, Ph.D., Professor, George Washington University School of Business
Lauren Rhue, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
Apryl A. Williams, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication & Media and the Digital Studies Institute, University of Michigan; Faculty Fellow, Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study
Ifeoma Ajunwa, Law Professor, University of North Carolina School of Law; Adjunct Associate Professor, Kenan-Flagler School of Business; Founding Director, Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program, University of North Carolina School of Law
Ali Alkhatib, Director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics, University of San Francisco
Karen Levy, Assistant Professor of Information Science, Cornell University; Associate Faculty, Cornell Law School
Albert Fox Cahn, Founder and Executive Director, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
Carissa Véliz, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Institute for Ethics in AI; Fellow, Hertford College, University of Oxford
“Democratizing AI has, in itself, a huge number of challenges, because the kind of computing resources needed to compete in the commercial AI space are available to very few corporations or research labs, and so those corporations and research labs that are also engaged in a sort of intellectual property race and war.”
– Noopur Raval
