Friday 2 December 12:15 - 13:00, Online via ZoomReuben Binns, Associate Professor of Human Centred Computing, Department of Computing Science, the University of Oxford will give a talk at Centre for Transdisciplinary AI with the title “AI and the Human in the Loophole”.
Visions of artificial intelligence have often sought to keep a 'human in the loop' rather than creating fully autonomous systems, and various regulations require human intervention in automated decision-making. One account of why we have these provisions is that by bringing a human into the AI system, we can reconnect with the emotive basis of ethical decision-making. But this motivation seems at odds with the reality of the dominant forces behind the majority of real-world applications of AI today, which seem premised on the removal of human judgement, creativity and empathy.
In this context, rather than a meaningful counteracting force, the human in the loop may end up as a fig leaf which actually serves to legitimate whatever the underlying logics of the AI system are. In his talk, Binns will cover some of the ways in which a human in the loop may in fact provide a loophole allowing fundamentally anti-human technologies to be deployed.
Moderator of the session is Markus Naarttijärvi, professor at Department of Law, Focus Area Coordinator Critical, Ethical, Legal and Social AI at TAIGA, and member of DIGSUM’s research group on Digital Law.
Read more about DIGSUM’s research group on Digital Law [here].