• Wed, Jul 24, 2019
  Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
  The Labour Behind AI: Micro-Work and the Platform Economy (w/ Julian Posada) (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)

  

  The Labour Behind AI: Micro-Work and the Platform Economy

  From data collection and annotation to AI impersonation, platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Upwork fragment and outsource tasks to millions of workers around the globe, many of them situated in developing countries. This seminar focuses on how human labour in the platform economy helps to create and maintain AI systems. It positions platforms as organizational paradigms and retraces their historical evolution within contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. While “micro-work” platforms generate employment in developing countries, they are often disengaged from the traditional social role of enterprises and do not provide any social and economic protections to their workers. Due to their international nature, effective regulation of these platforms is challenging. However, this seminar concludes by presenting other potential alternatives that could improve the working conditions of workers in the global platform economy such as the implementation of ethical work principles and the empowerment of workers through co-operation.

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  Julian Posada
  University of Toronto
  Faculty of Information

  Julian Posada is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Information of the University of Toronto and a Junior Fellow of Massey College. His research focuses on alternative forms of organization, fair labour, and worker co-operation in the platform economy. Previously, he worked for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and holds a master’s degree in economic sociology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and a bachelor’s degree in the Humanities from Sorbonne University.

  04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
  Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
  200 Larkin
  

• Wed, Aug 7, 2019
  Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
  Business-as-Trust: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Era of AI (w/ Michael Motala) (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)

  

  Business-as-Trust: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Era of AI

  The new Artificial Intelligence-powered social technology economy has disrupted local and global markets with bewildering speed. From hoteling to online dating to urban transportation, GPS-enabled location-based apps like Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and Airbnb have broken down conventional axes of economic regulation, social interaction, and commercial power. Why and how must we reimagine the normative and practical foundations of corporate social responsibility and business ethics? Current approaches such as the stockholder and stakeholder theory of corporate social responsibility are vague, abstract, indeterminate, and have little relevance to the modern economy. To move past this impasse, this lecture, which is based on a forthcoming book entitled The New Business Ethics (Routledge, 2019), argues we must reimagine corporate social responsibility in five critical ways: as a practical process of decision-making and accountability that exists to foster and maintain trust in enterprise; as a dynamic and process-relational system of interconnected institutions and agents; as a discourse ethics concerned with articulating a new universal pragmatics; as an actor-centric model of market-state relations; and as a new social constitution of the digital economy grounded in the principles of responsibility, transparency, and accountability.

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  Michael Motala
  University of Toronto
  Political Science

  Michael Motala is an Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics, and a PhD student studying political science. Michael’s research interests lie at the intersection of law, economics, political science, and pragmatist moral philosophy. He holds degrees from Columbia University, Osgoode Hall Law School, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Toronto’s Trinity College.

  04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
  Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
  200 Larkin
  

• Wed, Aug 21, 2019
  Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars
  Automated Violence: Who Will Guard the Guards? (w/ Daniella Barreto & Nicole Leaver) (Ethics of AI in Context: Emerging Scholars)

  

  Automated Violence: Who Will Guard the Guards?

  We will discuss automated decision-making systems (ADMs) being deployed by police services, with a specific focus on the RCMP’s “Project Wide Awake.” The surveillance program, sans privacy impact assessment, has garnered little media attention despite the chilling precedent it sets regarding privacy rights in Canada. In June 2017, the RCMP acquired and launched a social media surveillance program specifically targeting Black Lives Matter activists in Vancouver, BC. Our discussion will highlight some of the key features of the project and unpack a series of questions, including: Was there an objective to collecting data on BLM activists? Was the data disclosed to any other databases and third-parties, such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) database? And has this data been used to train ADMs? We will highlight how mass surveillance programs can exacerbate discriminatory and violent policing behaviours when data collection mechanisms and ADMs go unvetted and unchecked.

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  Daniella Barreto
  Amnesty International Canada
  Digital Activism Coordinator

  Daniella Barreto is a public health researcher and anti-racist queer activist. She holds an MSc. in population and public health and continues advocacy work with sex workers and people living with HIV. She is a co-founder of RUDE: The Podcast, a professional photographer and Nuance writing fellow. She is currently Digital Activism Coordinator at Amnesty International Canada.

  Nicole Leaver
  Artificial Intelligence Impact Alliance
  Public Sector Technology Researcher

  Nicole Leaver is a progressive policy researcher and graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Her current research focuses on automated decision-making systems and inequality in Canada. She is a public sector technology researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Impact Alliance and a co-founder of RUDE: The Podcast.

   

  04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
  Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
  200 Larkin
  

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