Please join us for the next presentation in the 2024-2025 seminar series Charting the Landscape of Ethical AI.

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Bernd Carsten Stahl, Professor of Critical Research in Technology at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham.

Dr. Carsten Stahl will be presenting February 21st, 9-10:30am, on Artificial Intelligence for a Better Future: An Ecosystem Perspective on the Ethics of AI and Emerging Digital Technologies.  Smart information systems (SIS) are systems that incorporate artificial intelligence techniques, in particular machine learning and big data analytics. These raise significant hopes, for example to better understand and cure diseases, but also to revolutionize transport, to optimize business processes or reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, they raise many ethical and social concerns, ranging from worries about biases and resulting discrimination to the distribution of socio-economic and political power and their impact on democracy. 

Drawing on the findings of the SHERPA project (project-sherpa.eu), the presentation will suggest that one perspective to better understand these systems and their social and ethical consequences is to use the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe them, a metaphor already widely used in the policy discourse on AI. The talk will analyze what the use of the ecosystem metaphor means for the evaluation of ethical issues of smart information systems and which conclusions can be drawn from it and how these can inform recommendations for policymakers and other stakeholders. 

The presentation is based on the material developed in a book, which is freely available from: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-69978-9

The 2024-2025 seminar series is a joint presentation of the Research Ethics Education Program/Graduate Division, the RAISE Institute, and the Office of Research and Economic Development.