In Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Meredith Broussard adds to the growing literature exploring the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) and techno-solutionism, furthermore showing how its socially-constructed nature replicates existing structural inequalities. Calling for greater racial and gender diversity in tech, the book offers a timely, accessible and often entertaining account that sets the record straight on what current approaches to […]
Category: AI
Data-driven discrimination: a new challenge for civil society
Data-driven technologies have been a transformative force in society. However, while such innovations are often viewed as a positive development, discriminatory biases embedded in these technologies can serve to compound problems for society’s more vulnerable groups. Having recently published a report on automated discrimination in data-driven systems, Jędrzej Niklas and Seeta Peña Gangadharan explain how algorithms discriminate, why this raises […]
Control Issues: A Report of SXSW ’18
We went to the SXSW Conference this year to reach an audience of tech developers with our session Hacking the Library of Congress. As you may expect from an emerging technology conference, sessions on virtual reality (VR) (48 sessions) and blockchain (29 sessions) dominated the week. At the Virtual Cinema, attendees demoed a variety of VR […]
What a fossil revolution reveals about the history of “big data”
Improved technologies have allowed faster and more powerful statistical analysis and changed how we “see” data. It’s now taken for granted that the best way to understand large, complex phenomena is by crunching the numbers via computers and projecting the results as visual summaries. To David Sepkoski, that’s not a bad thing, but it does pose some challenges. The complexity […]
Artificial intelligence can expedite scientific communication and eradicate bias from the publishing process
Scientific publishing already uses some early artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to address certain issues with the peer review process, such as identifying new reviewers or fighting plagiarism. As part of a BioMed Central/Digital Science report on the future of peer review, Chadwick C. DeVoss outlines what other innovations AI might facilitate. Software with the capability to complete subject-oriented reviews of […]