HCII Seminar Series - David Widder
Speaker
David Widder
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305
Video
Video link
Description
"AI Supply Chains: Tools to Locate Power and Responsibility in AI Production for Critical, Accountable Computing"
Contemporary AI production is structured to enable ignorance of harm for those who want it, and complicate resistance for those who don’t. Through case studies of the fractured AI supply chains in a variety of contexts—open source deepfake tools, NASA’s AI autocoder, and AI engineers' own ethical concerns—we will examine how a lack of relationality between distributed sites of AI production fractures knowledge, responsibility, and power, leading to unaccountable harm.
We will then discuss ways to intervene in AI supply chains toward critical, accountable computing. Firstly, we will examine interventions to enable epistemic pluralism in AI production, in particular knowledge from personal experiences of harm. We will then discuss the political economy of AI, which corporate and military actors have access to AI’s requisite resources, and ways to hold them accountable for their claims and harms. Finally, we will discuss technical ways to reassemble AI supply chains, to normalize engineers knowing and caring how their work is used, and to enable advocates and policymakers to understand infrastructural dependencies of harm. In this way, AI supply chains can help us find points of intervention toward a more critical, accountable field of computing.
Speaker's Bio
David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating artificial intelligence systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, technical, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, an affiliate of the Data & Society research institute, and a research fellow of the European AI & Society Fund. He earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
His recent work has been published at ACM FAccT and CSCW, Big Data & Society, and Nature. His scholarly and activist work has been covered in venues including Motherboard, MIT Technology Review, Wired, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. His work appears on 16 syllabi from gender studies to computer science, and is cited in AI policy briefs by the ACLU, the Roosevelt Institute, Mozilla and many others.
David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against carceral technology and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running.
Speaker's Website
Website
Host
Ken Holstein