Progress, Regression, and the Social Adoption of AI
27th October: 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm GMT
Contemporary debates about Artificial Intelligence and its adoption by societies are embedded––explicitly or implicitly––within assumptions about the relationship between technological and social progress or regression. Many of the current worries about the widespread adoption in society can be cast in terms of its potential effects being regressive. The potential for AI to fundamentally change society is not seriously in doubt. It has already raised questions in educational and research contexts. In politics, the future of democratic political arrangements in an age of AI has been wondered about. In economics, we have begun to take seriously the possibility that our labour-market economy will be fundamentally eroded if AI is able and allowed to take over an increasingly broad range of work. Finally, and perhaps more ephemerally, questions about the impact of AI on our changing conception of what it means to be human have been raised.
Both progress and regression are contested normative terms that are often used with naïveté among various important groups within contemporary society, from politicians and journalists, to the CEO’s of the company’s producing AI, and everyday citizens––but this is one area where naïveté may come at a high cost. I will consider whether and how the framework of progress and regression developed by Rahel Jaeggi might be applied to some of these questions as well as some of the problems that the framework encounters in any attempt at application. Yet, these problems are useful in and of themselves as pointers to the sorts of questions that need to be answered. They point, for example, to questions about what sorts of predictive capabilities any theory of progress needs to have to be genuinely useful and whether or not our current conceptions of justice––especially those that operate within current institutions––are theories that can continue to serve us.
Hallam Willis will host this hybrid seminar at 5:30pm Tuesday the 27th of October in the Aula of Blackfriars Hall. This event is free and open to all, no registration is required for in-person attendance. For online attendance, please register through Zoom.
Speaker
Hal read the BPhil at Oxford and his research is focused on developing a normative rather than purely technical framework for AI forecasting
Contact:
Las Casas Institute
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk