- Tue, Oct 26, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Avery Slater, The Golem and the Game of Automation (Ethics of AI in Context)
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The Golem and the Game of Automation
Norbert Wiener, a foundational force in cybernetics and information theory, often used the allegory of the Golem to represent the ethical complexities inherent in machine learning. Recent advances in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) deal explicitly with problems laid out by Wiener’s earlier writings, including the importance of games as learning environments for the development of AI agents. This talk explores issues from contemporary machine learning that express Wiener’s prescient notion of developing a “significant game” between creator and machine.
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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Avery Slater
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
English
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Oct 27, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
Mathew Iantorno, Automating Care, Manufacturing Crisis (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)
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Automating Care, Manufacturing Crisis
Artificially intelligent agents that provide care for human beings are becoming an increasing reality globally. From disembodied therapists to robotic nurses, new technologies have been framed as a means of addressing intersecting labour shortages, demographic shifts, and economic shortfalls. However, as we race towards AI-focused solutions, we must scrutinize the challenges of automating care. This talk engages in a two-part reflection on these challenges. First, issues of building trust and rapport in such relationships will be examined through an extended case study of a chatbot intended to help individuals quit smoking. Second, the institutional rationale for favouring machine-focused solutions over human-focused ones will be questioned through the speaker’s concept of crisis automation. Throughout, new equitable cybernetic relationships between those provisioning and receiving care will be platformed.
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This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Mathew Iantorno
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
iSchool
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 3, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Henry Krahn, Between Persuasion and Coercion: Protest as Holding Accountable (Ethics@Noon-ish)
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Between Persuasion and Coercion: Protest as Holding Accountable
In this talk, I argue that understanding forceful protest as a form of holding others accountable allows us to see how forceful protest can be neither persuasive nor coercive. As a result, I contend, this view of protest allows us to resolve some troubling justificatory questions facing forceful protest. I begin by presenting two parallel problems in political and moral theory, respectively. The first is the problem of coercive protest. Philosophical writing on civil disobedience often responds to a tension between the force of protest and respect for one’s fellow citizens. Contemporary protest movements often make use of forceful tactics, such as in blockades. But the language of force can evoke worries about coercion or of forcing one’s views on others. The second is the problem of sanctioning. On one hand, holding others accountable often involves sanctioning them—treating them harshly to get them to change their behaviour. On the other, moral philosophers often claim that viewing others as responsible agents requires that we reason with them, rather than train or manipulate them. But sanctioning might seem more like manipulation than reasoning.
I use these problems to motivate a view of holding accountable that presents a solution to both. Sanctions, on this view, are not a form of reasoning, but are reasons-structured. Properly sanctioning requires that we endorse the moral claims we uphold, and that we care about the ones we sanction changing their behaviour for the right reason. I contend that sanctioning is thus compatible with respect for others as rational agents. I then extend this account to offer a similar solution to the first problem: forceful protest can involve the symbolic imposition of sanctions which, although forceful, is nevertheless reasons-structured and so compatible with respect for one’s fellow citizens.
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Henry Krahn
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 4, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Maandeeq Mohamed, Every Discipline You're Practicing Ceases to Exist: Errant Reading and Black Visual Cultures
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Every Discipline You’re Practicing Ceases to Exist: Errant Reading and Black Visual Cultures
There is a moment in Charmaine Nelson’s “The Hottentot Venus in Canada,” where she engages the Art Gallery of Toronto’s (the precursor to today’s AGO) 1927 censoring of Max Weber’s paintings for referencing Saartjie Baartman. Almost a century after the AGO’s censoring of Weber, ethnography and portraiture also bump up against each other on the AGO’s walls, in the work of Sandra Brewster. In Brewster’s Blur, we encounter portraits of Black people who are directed to move while their photo is taken. Brewster employs the technique of long exposures, resulting in portraits of swirling blurs: the flooding light from the long exposure cannot fully capture Black movement with the camera. Against the enclosure of daguerreotype, and the medical diagram, Brewster gives us opaque images of Blackness in motion. Through Brewster and Nelson as a starting point, this talk engages how Black visual cultures call for errant reading practices where, after Sylvia Wynter, “every discipline you’re practicing ceases to exist.”
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Thursday, November 4. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer engaging Black Studies and related cultural production. Her writing is featured in Real Life, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. Maandeeq is currently a PhD student in English and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholar.
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 16, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Sunit Das (Ethics of AI in Context)
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Sunit Das
University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, Division of Neurosurgery, St. Michael’s Hospital & Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Nov 17, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Aden Dur-e-Aden, Mobilization of Individuals within Radical Right-Wing Groups in Canada: Ethics of Researching Contentious Politics (Ethics@Noon-ish)
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Mobilization of Individuals within Radical Right-Wing Groups in Canada: Ethics of Researching Contentious Politics
Radicalization, Extremism, Terrorism; all these words carry political baggage and are not always easy to define. Both inside and outside academia, these concepts remain contested, subjective, and up until recently, were often used to describe the actions of religiously inspired individuals and groups. While radical right-wing groups are not a new phenomenon in Canada, the topic is now gaining more attention due to recent events in the news. In this talk, I discuss the ethical issues I had to navigate while researching the mobilization of individuals within radical right-wing groups; both as a researcher who was required to treat her subjects with respect irrespective of their views, and as a person of color who was an outsider trying to understand the inner workings of this milieu.
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel, on Wednesday, November 17. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Aden Dur-e-Aden
Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellow
Political Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Thu, Nov 18, 2021
Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars
Manvinder Kaur Gill, Germs of Rot: Colonialism, Culture, and Immigrant Mental Health Discourse (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)
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Germs of Rot: Colonialism, Culture, and Immigrant Mental Health Discourse
In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” In exploring how contemporary mental health discourse continues to perpetuate colonial ideals, I will use a case study about the relationship Sikh Canadians have with alcohol wherein community members argue that Panjabi culture promotes the consumption of alcohol while Sikhi prohibits it. I will unravel this binary through an exploration of the racialization of culture, internalized colonialism, and power.
Looking more broadly towards popular discourse around mental health within larger South Asian diasporas, although there has been a growing urge to “normalize” conversations about mental health and create “culturally competent” resources for racialized communities, these resources continue to rely on and perpetuate colonial tropes that paint white communities as progressive and forward thinking and racialized communities as inherently and reprehensibly flawed and backwards. I will argue that much of South Asian mental health discourse functions from a deficit-based model, where there appears to be a clear monolithicizing, mythologizing, and infantilizing of immigrant parents which functions to recreate colonial hierarchies wherein the child of immigrants (creator of this discourse) has become the colonizer, the holder of the “correct” knowledge. In conclusion, I will propose key considerations for what decolonization can look like in practice and how we can detect and remove this rot from our minds.
► please register here
This is an online event, available on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Manvinder Kaur Gill is currently a SSHRC-funded Master of Social Work student at the University of Toronto where she holds a research assistantship on a project titled “Border(ing) Practices: Systemic Racism, Immigration, and Child Welfare” and is completing a clinical and research internship at Women’s Health in Women’s Hands, a community health centre providing primary healthcare to Black Women and Women of Colour from Caribbean, African, Latin American, and South Asian communities in Toronto.
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Nov 30, 2021
Ethics of AI in Context
Frank Pasquale & Gianclaudio Malgieri (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Frank Pasquale
Law
Brooklyn Law School
Gianclaudio Malgieri
Law & Technology
EDHEC Business
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Dec 1, 2021
Ethics at Noon
Shozab Raza (Ethics@Noon-ish)
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12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Shozab Raza
PhD Candidate, Anthropology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 12, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Allison Weir (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Allison Weir
Centre for Ethics Visiting Scholar
Philosophy
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Jan 18, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Ori Freiman (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Ori Freiman
Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics of AI
Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 26, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Muhammad Kavesh (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Muhammad Kavesh
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 1, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Kelly Hannah-Moffat (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Kelly Hannah-Moffat
University of Toronto
Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and Sociology
Vice-President, People Strategy, Equity and Culture
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Feb 9, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Rebecca Livernois (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Rebecca Livernois
Centre for Ethics Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Philosophy
University of Toronto
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Feb 15, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Wendy Wong (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Wendy Wong
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Political Science
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Mar 2, 2022
Ethics at Noon
Gail Super (Ethics@Noon-ish)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Gail Super
Sociology
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Tue, Mar 8, 2022
Ethics of AI in Context
Tom Yeh & Benjamin Walsh (Ethics of AI in Context)► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.
Tom Yeh
Computer Science
University of ColoradoBenjamin Walsh
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Education
University of Colorado
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
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