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December 14, 2020: J. Khadijah Abdurahman on Timnit Gebru's firing and "the moral collapse" of AI ethics

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Pointing to this New York Times article (Dec 9, 2020)

Pointing to this New York Times article (Dec 9, 2020)

Tonight: J. Khadijah Abdurahman on Timnit Gebru's firing and "the moral collapse" of AI ethics

Links:

• On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics, by Khadijah (Dec 7, 2020)

• Khadijah on Twitter: @upfromthecracks

• We Be Imagining, made possible by Columbia's The American Assembly and the INCITE project

• We Be Imagining podcast, hosted by Khadijah

• We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here's what it says (by Karen Hao in Technology Review, Dec 4, 2020)

• Wikipedia on Dr. Timnit Gebru: "Gebru co-authored a paper on the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people."

• Interview with Khadijah on Our Data Bodies (May 2020): "The biggest blind spot in the conversation about algorithms and automated decision making is that often the algorithms are compared to human decision making."

• U.S. and States Say Facebook Illegally Crushed Competition (NYT, Dec 9). See also Matt Stoller, in The End of the Facebook Crime Spree (Dec 9): "What Mark Zuckerberg did at Facebook is engage in systemic criminal behavior, and he was able to do so because law enforcers refused to enforce the law against the powerful. That era is over." (Here's my own comment.)

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