This keynote from the NIPS 2017 conference by Kate Crawford is excellent – a good resource for anyone interested in thinking and communicating about the issues of bias in AI.
The Trouble with Bias – Kate Crawford [Video]
[Video] Intersectionality
This is an excellent video commissioned by Peter Hopkins on intersectionality – a really good teaching resource and brilliant thing to be able to share.
What is Intersectionality? from Peter Hopkins on Vimeo.
Seminar> Charis Thompson: On the Posthuman in the Age of Automation and Augmentation
If you happen to be in Exeter on Friday 11th May then I urge you to attend this really interesting talk by Prof. Charis Thompson (UC Berkeley), organised by Sociology & Philosophy at Exeter. Here’s the info:
Guest speaker – Professor Charis Thompson: On the Posthuman in the Age of Automation and Augmentation
| A Department of Sociology & Philosophy lecture | |
|---|---|
| Date | 11 May 2018 |
| Time | 14:00 to 15:15 |
| Place | IAIS Building/LT1 |
Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, UC Berkeley, and Professor, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics. She is the author of Making Parents; The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press 2007), which won the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society of the Social Studies of Science, and of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press 2013). Her book in progress, Getting Ahead, revisits classic questions on the relation between science and democracy in an age of populism and inequality, focusing particularly on genome editing and AI.
She served on the Nuffield Council Working Group on Genome Editing, and serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Council on Technology, Values and Policy. Thompson is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Social Science Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2017, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the National Science and Technology University of Norway for work on science and society.
SPA PGR Conference Committee
Maria Dede
Aimee Middlemiss
Celia Plender
Elena Sharratt
Automating inequality – Virginia Eubanks and interlocutors [video]
This Data & Society talk by Virginia Eubanks on her book Automating Inequality followed by a discussion with Alondra Nelson and Julia Angwin is excellent. This seems like vital empirical analysis and insights that flesh out what is, perhaps, frequently gestured towards by ‘critical algorithm studies’ folks – ‘auditing algorithms’, analysing what’s in the black box, how systems function and what is their material and socio-economic specificity and what then can we learn about how particular forms of actually existing automation (and not simply abstract ideals) function.
Eubanks talks for the first 20-ish minutes and then there’s a discussion that follows. This is really worth watching if you’re interested in doing algorithm studies type work and in doing ‘digital geographies’ that don’t simply lapse into ontology talk.
Reblog> WIAS Workshop: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 31/01/18
Saw this via Phoebe Moore:
WIAS Workshop: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism
by Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies
This workshop marks the publication of the special issue “Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism” in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. We will hear presentations by experts who have contributed to the issue: guest editor Thomas Allmer (University of Stirling), Karen Gregory (University of Edinburgh) and Jamie Woodcock (LSE).
Modern universities have always been embedded in capitalism in political, economic and cultural terms. In 1971, at the culmination of the Vietnam War, a young student pointed a question towards Noam Chomsky: “How can you, with your very courageous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?” Chomsky had to admit that his workplace was a major organisation conducting war research, thereby strengthening the political contradictions and inequalities in capitalist societies.
Today, universities are positioning themselves as active agents of global capital, transforming urban spaces into venues for capital accumulation and competing for international student populations for profit. Steep tuition fees are paid for precarious futures. Increasingly, we see that the value of academic labour is measured in capitalist terms and therefore subject to new forms of control, surveillance and productivity measures. Situated in this economic and political context, the new special issue of tripleC (edited by Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut) is a collection of critical contributions that examine universities, academic labour, digital media and capitalism.
Workshop presentations:
Anger in Academic Twitter: Sharing, Caring, and Getting Mad Online
Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh
Digital Labour in the University: Understanding the Transformations of Academic Work in the UK
Jamie Woodcock, LSE
Theorising and Analysing Academic Labour
Thomas Allmer, University of Stirling
The workshop will be chaired by WIAS Director and tripleC co-editor Christian Fuchs. WIAS invites everybody interested to attend this afternoon of talks and discussions tackling the question of academic labour in the age of digital capitalism. A coffee break is provided.
Thomas Allmer is Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK, and a member of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria. His publications include Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2012) and Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification (Routledge, 2015). For more information, see Thomas’ website.
Karen Gregory is a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, a digital sociologist and ethnographer. She researches the relationship between work, technology, and emerging forms of labour, exploring the intersection of work and labor, social media use, and contemporary spirituality. She is the co-editor of the book Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2017).
Jamie Woodcock is a fellow at the LSE and author of Working The Phones. His current research focuses on digital labour, the sociology of work, the gig economy, resistance, and videogames. He has previously worked as a postdoc on a research project about videogames, as well as another on the crowdsourcing of citizen science. Jamie completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has held positions at Goldsmiths, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, Queen Mary, NYU London, and Cass Business School.
Christian Fuchs is Professor at the University of Westminster. He is the Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS). His fields of expertise are critical digital & social media studies, Internet & society, political economy of media and communication, information society theory, social theory and critical theory. He co-edits the open-access journal triple:Communication, Capitalism & Critique with Marisol Sandoval.
CFP – Beyond measure, ephemera journal
This looks interesting…
Beyond measure
submission deadline 1 March 2018
Issue editors: Nick Butler, Helen Delaney, Emilie Hesselbo and Sverre Spoelstra
Measurement is a central task of capitalist organization. From the days of the industrial factory, when labour first came to be measured in hours, through to the time-motion studies under Taylorist regimes, measurement has involved the optimization of surplus value extraction from labour. During the 20th century, these techniques of measurement were complemented by more intrusive forms of quantification such as the use of psychological testing in the human relations school.
The will to quantify continues today with balanced scorecards and activity-based costing (Power, 2004), the discourse of employability (Chertkovskaya, et al., 2013), the monitoring of work in the service economy (Dowling, 2007), and the performativity of economics (Callon, 1998). At the same time, others point to the impossibility of measuring affective work and immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri, 2000). More generally, ‘trust in numbers’ (Porter, 1995) – based on a longstanding infatuation with the ideal of objectivity (Stengers, 2000) – is becoming characteristic of a totally quantified society in which we keep track of our diet, fitness, sleeping habits, and menstrual cycles via digital tracking technologies (Charitsis, 2016).
Quantification also lies at the heart of knowledge production in the business school (Zyphur et al., 2016). Ever since the early influence of Paul Lazarsfeld (1993) in the post-war years, management science has been preoccupied with the measurement of ‘objects’, ranging from things that are straightforwardly measurable (e.g. the height of employees in leadership positions) to things that are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify (e.g. charisma, authenticity, ethics). Despite a half-century of criticism directed at the positivist tradition in the social sciences, management science still holds to the McNamara fallacy: ‘If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist’. The politics of measurement in management theory and practice – and its link to the logic of capitalist exploitation – therefore deserve sustained critical scrutiny.
For this ephemera special issue, we invite papers that explore the stakes of measuring organizations and their members – especially in contested zones of quantification. For instance, what happens when employees are measured not just in terms of productivity but also their health and well-being (Cederström and Spicer, 2015)? What happens when leaders are measured not just in terms of bottom-line performance but also their authenticity or spirituality (Ford and Harding, 2011)? Closer to home, what happens when academics are measured not just in terms of the quality of their scholarship but also their citation rate and H-index (Nkomo, 2009)?
But we are also interested in what is beyond measure – that is, the relation between organizing and the immeasurable. Here, religion and spirituality come into view. One may think of themes such as the call for a ‘higher purpose’ in work, the role of faith and spirituality in business, and the presence of organizational figures who defy measurement (idols, spirits, ghosts, monsters, etc.). Deleuze (1995: 181) famously said that the idea that organizations have a soul is ‘the most terrifying news in the world’. For us, this is no longer news but perhaps all the more terrifying for it.
Efforts to quantify aspects of our organizational lives give rise to new and complex ethical questions around work, identity and politics. We therefore invite submissions that may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Measuring organizations, management and leadership
- The excessive, the limitless and the infinite
- Big data and algorithmic management
- The quantified self and digital measurement technologies
- The turn to ‘objectivity’ in the social sciences
- Zero and nothingness
- The performativity of measures
- Value theory and the immeasurability of labour
- The reevaluation of values
- Faith and spirituality in business
- Time-motion studies and their contemporary equivalents
- Death and ‘the great beyond’ in organization
- The use of psychometric instruments in management theory and practice
- Commensuration and incommensurability in organizational theory and practice
- The politics of performance audits
- Measuring the immeasurable
Deadline and further information
The deadline for submissions is 1st March 2018. All submissions should be sent to one of the special issue editors: Nick Butler (nick.butler@sbs.su.se), Helen Delaney (h.delaney@auckland.ac.nz), Emilie Hesselbo (emilie.hesselbo@fek.lu.se) or Sverre Spoelstra (sverre.spoelstra@fek.lu.se). ephemeraencourages contributions in a variety of formats including articles, notes, interviews, book reviews, photo essays and other experimental modes of representation. The submissions will undergo a double-blind review process. All submissions should follow ephemera’s submission guidelines, which are available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit (see ‘Abc of formatting’ guide). For further information, please contact one of the special issue editors.
John Danaher interview – Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications
Via Philosophical Disquisitions.
Through the wonders of the modern technology, myself and Adam Ford sat down for an extended video chat about the new book Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press, 2017). You can watch the full thing above or on youtube. Topics covered include:
- Why did I start writing about this topic?
- Sex work and technological unemployment
- Can you have sex with a robot?
- Is there a case to be made for the use of sex robots?
- The Campaign Against Sex Robots
- The possibility of valuable, loving relationships between humans and robots
- Sexbots as a social experiment
Be sure to check out Adam’s other videos and support his work.
Reblog> Should robots be granted the status of legal personhood?
From John Danaher’s Philosophical Disquisitions.
Danaher offers his incisive analysis of recent additions to the debate on legal personhood re. “robots”. Seems interesting (to me) in relation to two things: agency, and how we imagine automation – since we don’t actually have such ‘robots’ at the moment. It’s quite a long post (so only a snippet below), but worth working through… not least because in geographyland it seems to me many of us have a very narrow understanding of these sorts of things from a fairly narrow (simplified) post-structuralist account of ‘subjectivity‘.
Should robots be granted the status of legal personhood?
The EU parliament attracted a good deal of notoriety in 2016 when its draft report on civil liability for robots suggested that at least some sophisticated robots should be granted the legal status of ‘electronic personhood’. British tabloids were quick to seize upon the idea — the report came out just before the Brexit vote — as part of their campaign to highlight the absurdity of the EU. But is the idea really that absurd? Could robots ever count as legal persons?
A recent article by Bryson, Diamantis and Grant (hereinafter ‘BDG’) takes up these questions. In ‘Of, for and by the people: the legal lacuna or synthetic persons’, they argue that the idea of electronic legal personhood is not at all absurd. It is a real but dangerous possibility — one that we should actively resist. Robots can, but should not, be given the legal status of personhood.
BDG’s article is the best thing I have read on the topic of legal personhood for robots. I believe it presents exactly the right framework for thinking about and understanding the debate. But I also think it is misleading on a couple of critical points. In what follows, I will set out BDG’s framework, explain their central argument, and present my own criticisms thereof.