danah boyd to deliver the Center for Digital Ethics Inaugural Distinguished Lecture

danah boyd

Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University; founder, Data & Society

“Bracing for Impact: AI in the Wild”

April 10 at 4 p.m. in the Fisher Colloquium, Hariri Building Fourth Floor

Part of Tech & Society Week at Georgetown

Reception to follow

From the moment ChatGPT launched publicly, the hype-making and fear-mongering about Generative AI began. Would AI finally bring about a leisure-filled world with robots doing our bidding? Or would AI destroy humanity? These were but two of the poles of the conversation as public commentators wrestled with how AI might reconfigure work, creativity, politics, and social life. In turn, questions of ethics, equity, responsibility, and accountability quickly followed suit. For well over a year now, countless communities are rushing head-first into re-centering their work around AI and its potential implications. Some are pursuing a new goldrush; others simply want to be relevant.

In this talk, boyd will explore different facets of this cacophonous circus with an eye towards grounding the hype and fear back in the earth. She will examine how earlier phases of AI transformed different work-related practices, discuss how the process and practice of doing ethics during a hype cycle requires abstracting away from the moment, and push the audience to resist deterministic thinking as everyone grapples with an AI-infused world.