LASER Talks at Stanford | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

LASER Talks at Stanford

The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world.


CHAIRED BY: Piero Scaruffi


A panel on "The Algorithmic Society" with Irina Raicu (Program Director of Internet Ethics at the Santa Clara University), Michal Kosinski (Stanford Graduate School of Business), Simina Mistreanu (China-based journalist) and cultural historian Piero Scaruffi.
 

February 25 @ 6pm PST California time, Find your timezone HERE
 

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The original idea was to celebrate the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's
death. The author of "1984" died one year before the introduction of the first
commercial computer. His novel is therefore devoid of algorithms. The 70 years since his death have instead been the age of algorithms, that increasingly dominate our lives. An individual is increasingly defined by a combination of numbers (your tax id, your driver license number, your medical insurance number,your credit card numbers, etc). And numbers are assigned to various aspects of your life: your state's DMV rates your driving skills, credit bureaus rate your financial life, and unknown numbers of algorithms spy on you online (and make you buy things you don't need). We have slowly created "algorithmic societies", societies where algorithms rate us and sometimes spy on us. Our society is increasingly regulated by algorithms. China has launched a "social credit system" that is possibly the most advanced use of algorithms to enforce "proper" behavior in society, but de facto the network of algorithms that, here in the USA, keep track of our increasingly online lives constitute a decentralized version of it (and perhaps an even more effective one). Are we achieving "social engineering" through algorithms? Can we use algorithms in more positive ways?

Michal Kosinski is a psychologist and data scientist. His research focuses on studying humans through the lenses of digital footprints left behind while using digital platforms and devices. He is an Assistant Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Michal holds a PhD in Psychology from University of Cambridge, an MPhil in Psychometrics, and a MS in Social Psychology. Michal coordinates the myPersonality project, which involves global collaboration between over 200 researchers, analyzing the detailed psycho-demographic profiles of over 8 million Facebook users.

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Center at
Santa Clara University. Her work addresses a wide variety of issues, ranging from online privacy to net neutrality, from data ethics to social media's impact on friendship and family, from the digital divide to the ethics of encryption, and from the ethics of artificial intelligence to the right to be forgotten. Raicu is a member of the Partnership on AI's Working Group on Fair, Transparent, and Accountable AI.

Simina Mistreanu is a China-based journalist whose work, spanning everything from China's social credit system to the crackdown campaign against minorities in Xinjiang, has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian and Al Jazeera. Before moving to China, in 2015, she covered local politics in Portland, Oregon. (Read her article in Foreign Policy)

Piero Scaruffi has published several books on Artificial Intelligence and
Cognitive Science since 1985. The latest is "Intelligence is not Artificial"
(2016). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. He is also the author of "A History of Silicon Valley". He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.

Detailed bios at: www.lasertalks.com

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The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks

When
February 25th, 2021 from  6:00 PM to  8:00 PM
Location
Online / Palo Alto, CA
United States
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