The 2nd Ecology of AI Workshop

 About the Workshop

Pratyusha Kalluri of the Radical AI Network has proposed that asking whether AI is good or fair is not the right question for understanding the impacts of AI [1]. We have to look at power. More specifically, we have to look at how AI impacts power relationships that preserve inequality within our society in very real and material terms, for example, through the vehicle of industrialised racial capitalism. 

One can consider the meta-ethical question of goodness or badness in many different ways, but the project of "ethical AI" often becomes conflated with specific ideas of morality, shifting the conversation toward the cultural arena. We can see evidence of this through the abstraction of ethics in research (e.g. lacking specific consideration of specific harms), based primarily on White, Western notions of harm, focusing on “single issue” conversations of equity (rather than global and historical power asymmetries) and mitigated through mathematical means [2]. 

Having a frank discussion, with multiple, diverse stakeholders, in which money, power and influence are part of the discussion of potential harm and benefit of AI is one of the aims of this workshop.  

To be able to consider the broader, world-systems thinking around harm and benefit, in the short-, medium- and long-term, we propose a frame of Ecology of Artificial Intelligence. This approach will allow us to consider the impact of AI technology on organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems and the biosphere (good and bad, and everything in between). 

[1] Kalluri P. Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power. Nature. 7 July 2020.

[2] Birhane A, Ruane E, Laurent T, S. Brown M, Flowers J, Ventresque A, L. Dancy C. The forgotten margins of AI ethics. In2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2022 Jun

Workshop Schedule

 Workshop Outcomes