Led by Professor Robin Mansell from the London School of Economics and Political Science. We will examine a fundamentally important question for the future of society: Is there ever likely to be an effective challenge to the pursuit of wealth through inequitable mass individualization? The ‘platformization of everything’ — by Google, Baidu, Facebook, Amazon and a few others — is implicated in the spread of misinformation and in the deepening of many kinds of inequalities. This lecture explores reasons for the persistence of cautious and relatively weak policy responses to platform power and whether a turn to radical democratic theory and practice might help to promote policy responses that work as a counterpoint to platform dominance. This event is part of the Digital Media Speaker Series and is sponsored by the Technology and Information Policy Institute (TIPI) and Good Systems.

Ubiquitous recorders are capturing our daily sounds on the street, at our work and leisure places, and in our homes. The study of the cultural, political, ethical, and technological impact of automating sound and incorporating it into different systems is in its infancy, and scholars and technologists often do not have a good understanding of what kind of data, what kind of techniques and algorithms, and what kinds of interpretations can be drawn from audio data in systems that use A.I. technologies. This event is part of our Acoustic Surveillance and Big Data Series and will ask participants what social and personal values are at play in given scenarios involving sound and voice recording and what concerns they have in terms of potential ethical or policy issues. 

Regulation and Responsibility: Join Microsoft’s Julie Brill, corporate VP and deputy general counsel, for a fireside chat and Q/A with Professor Sharon Strover from the Moody College of Communication. They’ll cover privacy, data protection, and tech policy.

Led by Dean Eric Meyer from the School of Information. The story of society is inextricably bound with the rise of tools and machines. In the digital age, the machines we have created have become immensely powerful on the one hand but are also limited in many ways. This talk uses examples from research over the last decade — including citizen science, digital scholarship, crisis response, and knowledge creation on the internet — to explore how humans and machines work jointly and independently in complex socio-technical assemblages. This event is part of the Digital Media Speaker Series at the Moody College of Communication.

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Join Sam Woolley from Institute of the Future at UT's Digital Media Speaker Series this month. The current wave of computational propaganda has taken the world by surprise. Technology firms, policy makers, journalists and the general public are scrambling to respond to the societal threats posed by disinformation and politically motivated trolling. This talk outlines one method for responding to these issues: the Ethical Operating System (ethicalOS.org), a toolkit for anticipating future uses of technology. Jane McGonigal and Samuel Woolley, with support from Omidyar Network, constructed this guide to help a wide variety of groups think about how to design technology with democracy and human rights in mind. The toolkit has been used by major companies in Silicon Valley, by legislators at the state and federal level and by students in Stanford's design school and intro to computer science courses. It's time, however, to put into the hands of the U.S. public so that they can help in the fight against disinformation and manipulative technology.

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