Kate Crawford on AI and Power: From Bias to Justice

Machine learning systems now play a much bigger role in many of our social institutions, from education to healthcare to criminal justice. But many scholars have shown the way these systems are built on data that result in the reproduction of structural bias and discrimination. In this talk, Professor Crawford opens the substrates of training data to uncover the historical origins, labor practices, infrastructures, and epistemological assumptions that go into the production of artificial intelligence. Rather than a focus on technically correcting biases, she argues for a recentering of justice and the enforcement of limits on centralized power. Kate Crawford, Co-Founder of the AI Now Institute, is a Distinguished Research Professor at NYU and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and she is a leading scholar of the social implications of data systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.