The Good Systems team here at UT aims to help technologists stop to think about what they are doing. We’ve embarked on an 8-year mission to design AI technologies that are driven by human values and that benefit society. We’ve done so because we believe it is ethically irresponsible to think about AI only in terms of what it can do; we believe it is even more important to consider what AI should — and should not — do.

Tim Hwang, a lawyer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of emerging technologies and society, says this isn’t realistic; machine learning and AI aren’t as they’re portrayed in the movies. Hwang is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance AI Initiative and has previously served Google’s global public policy lead on AI.

For scientists, building relationships means getting out of our heads and into our hearts. It means bringing our full self to the way we go about our quest to understand the world.

Paul Adams, a professor the Department of Geography and the Environment at The University of Texas at Austin, has met with farmers in the Panhandle and West Texas. He wanted to hear how they talk about things like the weather, climate, and the water they have available for their crops. If we don’t understand how people communicate about the ground they live on, we’ll have little success finding common ground to propel us toward a more resilient future.

Geology Professor Jay Banner, one of the authors of the federally mandated climate report released this past November, sat down with Spectrum News Austin’s Karina Kling to talk about what the climate and economic predictions mean for Texas and the southern U.S.

Austin Community Design and Development Center (ACDDC) collaborated with the Planet Texas 2050 team to ensure that researcher/community relationships are established in a way that is socially and culturally appropriate while fostering long-term partnerships that benefit everyone.

Children have a remarkable understanding of the things around them that affect their health and their community’s wellbeing. Although they may not have the language to describe it, young children and adolescents feel and experience injustice and inequity; however, their voices are often silenced or dismissed as juvenile.

For all of our history, mobility has helped to ensure our species’ success. But as more and more of the world’s population lives in cities, as more and more of our infrastructure and wealth is invested in those cities, and as our national borders harden in response to population movements driven by the ancient impulse to flee from danger, this option is increasingly off the table.

Sharing data in real time to research project participants makes it easier to see how a research project could actually contribute to improving people’s health.

All scientists want to better the human condition, and they struggle with how to share research findings in ways that help people make changes quickly. It’s hard to take complicated ideas and make them easier to understand, but that’s exactly what we have to do.