Emerging Topics in Integrated Machine Learning Systems
01 February 2021, 2:00 pm–3:00 pm

This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Gholamali Aminian
Computer scientists think often of ”Ender’s Game” these days. In this award-winning 1985 science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, Ender is being trained at Battle School, an institution designed to make young children into military commanders against an unspecified enemy. Ender’s team engages in a series of computer-simulated battles, eventually destroying the enemy’s planet, only to learn then that the battles were very real and a real planet has been destroyed.
Many of us got involved in computing because programming was fun. The benefits of computing seemed intuitive to us. We truly believe that computing yields tremendous societal benefits; for example, the life-saving potential of driverless cars is enormous! Like Ender, however, we realized recently that computing is not a game–it is real–and it brings with it not only societal benefits, but also significant societal costs, such as labour polarization, disinformation, and smart-phone addiction.
The common reaction to this crisis is to label it as an ”ethical crisis” and the proposed response is to add courses in ethics to the academic computing curriculum. I will argue that the ethical lens is too narrow. The real issue is how to deal with technology’s impact on society. Technology is driving the future, but who is doing the steering?
About the Speaker
Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor, Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, where he is leading an Initiative on Technology, Culture, and Society. His interests focus on automated reasoning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence with broad applications to computer science, including machine learning, database theory, computational-complexity theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is also a Faculty Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University