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Constellation Thinking and AI Ethics

Fri, September 6, 4:30 to 6:00pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Eight, Muses

Abstract

Although the ethical implications and social impacts of AI have become topics of compelling interest to industry, the academy and the public, analysis has been hobbled by problematic a priori assumptions about the most basic terms of conversation (e.g. ethics, intelligence, society), a lack of interdisciplinary collaboration, and a dearth of situated case studies. These absences both stem from and reproduce the uncertainty around the definition and meaning of the term “artificial intelligence” - a vagueness that some have pointed out has contributed to the blooming and booming of the field. Unencumbered by constraints of definition, a term like “artificial intelligence” operates as what Pascal Boyer calls an “empty concept,” allowing any number of initiatives, technologies and agents to operate beneath its cover, gathering steam. This panel proceeds with the assertion that in order to understand the “ethics of AI” (indeed in order to understand “AI”) we must understand the contexts in which AI-driven technologies are being generated, used and understood. We need empirically-grounded stories about the social life/lives of AI, and we need to tell these stories using a socio-technical language that reaches across the bounds of academia, industry, government and the public. This panel assembles a group of interdisciplinary scholars to present case studies, theoretical frameworks, and modes of expression to help us think more expansively and creatively about the stories we tell about AI and how they fuel the imaginaries with which we anticipate, create and evaluate these technologies, and also shape possible modes of intervention

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