October 30: CDE and Georgetown Humanities Initiative present “Why should we care about understanding AI?” with Prof. Will Fleisher
The Center for Digital Ethics and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative present
WILL FLEISHER, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
and Research Assistant Professor, Center for Digital Ethics
speaking on
“Why should we care about understanding AI?”
Part of the joint series “What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI”
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
4:00 pm
205 Old North, Georgetown University Main Campus
Please contact us at digitalethics@georgetown.edu with accessibility requests
The most sophisticated AI tools use models that are deeply opaque. They are so large, so complex, and are trained using so much data, that not even their developers fully understand why they function the way they do. AI models are even more opaque to the general public, as much of the knowledge of how AI is developed is kept secret by its developers. And even when the models are open source, this does not aid the comprehension of those without advanced training.
This opacity has raised concerns about the use of complex AI tools in a democratic society. Transparency is a requirement for democratic legitimacy. Moreover, some have argued that people have a right to an explanation for how they are treated. I think there is something fundamentally right about these concerns: we often do need to understand a tool before it is permissible to use it.
However, explaining why AI opacity is a problem for protecting legitimacy and the right to explanation is more complicated than it seems. There is a great deal of opacity present in our understanding of existing, non-AI technologies. For instance, drugs are commonly prescribed even without understanding their mechanism of action. Moreover, our governments currently operate with a great deal of opacity, and in some cases this opacity does not seem problematic. If we are to ground the importance of understanding AI, we need a better explanation of what that understanding does for us, and why we should care.
The Center for Digital Ethics and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative have launched the interdisciplinary event series “What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI?” to foster exchanges across departments on the role of intrinsically human attributes and of the humanities in facing the challenges of the latest digital and technological revolution.