https://humanities.wustl.edu/xml/events/21793/rss.xml
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Technology & Society

Keynotes

Kathleen Creel: Algorithmic Monoculture and Systemic Exclusion

Mistakes are inevitable, but fortunately human mistakes are typically hetergenous. Using the same machine learning model for high stakes decisions creates consistency while amplifying the weaknesses, biases, and indiosyncrasies of the original model. When the same person re-encounters the same model or models trained on the same dataset, she might be wrongly rejected again and again. Thus algorithmic monoculture could lead to consistent ill-treatment of individual people by homogenizing the decision outcomes they experience.

Is it wrong to allow the quirks of an algorithmic system to consistently exclute a small number of people from consequential opportunities? Many philosophers have claimed or indicated in passing that consistent and arbitrary exclusion is wrong, even when it is divorced from bias or discrimination. But why and under what circumstances it is unfair has not yet been established. This talk will formalize a measure of outcome homogenization, describe experiments that demonstrate that it occurs, then present an ethical argument for why and in what circumstances outcome homogenization is unfair.

Lana Swartz: Scam Technology - Cancelled

Scams are a hot topic, both in the media and in our financial lives. The new scamminess is both a reaction to precarity and a deepening of it. This talk draws from my recent research on scams, including AI scams, and longer term research on crypto and payment systems, to reflect on various facets of the work that scams -- and the idea of "scams" -- do in the production of the technology of our everyday financial lives.

Conference Schedule:

March 21 "AI"

  • 9:00am Breakfast and Coffee
  • 10:15am Opening Comments: Danielle Williams
  • 10:30am Rebecca Copenhaver, "Beyond Belief: Bullshit, Propoganda, and Coded Speech"
  • 11:30am Shiloh Deitz, "What Were You Thinking?: Replicability and Relevance in AI Research"
  • 12:30pm Lunch
  • 1:30pm Claudia Carroll, " 'Written in the Style of': What GPT generated literary text can tell us about cultural bias and literary style"
  • 2:30pm Liz Chiarello, "Trojan Horse Technologies: Smuggling Criminal-Legal Logics into Healthcare Practice"
  • 3:30pm Beverage Break (Hot Chocolate Bar)
  • 4:00pm Keynote: Kathleen Creel

March 22 "Finance & The Market"

  • 9:00am Breakfast and Cofee
  • 10:15am Opening Comments: Shirl Yang
  • 10:30am Emily Hite, "Cryptocarbon Futures: Blockchain, Hydropower, and the Myth of Sustainability"
                   +
                   Shirl Yang, "Liquidity is a Feeling"
  • 11:30am Paola del Toro, "Finance is an Inside Joke"
                   +
                   Rachel Brown, "Collective Care as Financial Disobedience"
  • 12:30pm Lunch
  • 1:30pm Diane Lewis, "Engineering the Self: Women Tech Workers and Neoliberalization in Japan"
                   +
    ​             Jianqing Chen, "Self-Media Entrepreneurship in Chinese Influence Industry"
  • 2:30pm Jennifer Yida Pan, "19th Century New Markets"
                   +
                 Patricia Olynyk
  • 3:30pm Beverage Break (Hot Chocolate Bar)