In an effort led by the Haas Center for Public Service and funded by an EST Hub Seed Grant, a new guide to public interest technology (PIT) initiatives at Stanford is available. The mission of the PIT Guide is to inform the community of PIT initiatives on campus, ways to get involved, and how to be better advocates for ensuring technology serves the public interest. Check out the PIT Guide here.
Ethics, Society, & Technology Unconference
Opening Remarks from Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne
May 13, 2021
November 8th 12:00PM PDT
We still do not have a sufficient understanding of the moral political economy of machine learning and other algorithmic forms of decision making. In a new working paper, Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade present one way of addressing this challenge. They argue that both machine learning and traditional bureaucracies are engines of classification, so that our current moral political economy can be compared to the 19th and 20th century "High Modernism" described by James C. Scott in his classic book, Seeing Like a State. What can we learn by thinking of these new techniques as a kind of "High-tech Modernism, and what do we miss? What are alternative ways of understanding this emerging moral political economy, and what are their respective strengths and blind spots? Join Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade in a roundtable discussion with danah boyd, William Janeway, Charlton McIlwain, and Zeynep Tufekci – renowned scholars and thinkers directly engaged with issues surrounding the moral political economy of technology – to consider these questions.
The mission of the EST Hub is to deepen Stanford’s strength in ethics and generate a fundamental shift in how faculty, staff, and students, whatever their disciplinary home, choice of major, and career pathway, think about our role as enablers and shapers of scientific discovery and technological change in society.
The EST Hub was created as part of Stanford's Presidential Initiative on Ethics, Society, and Technology. Co-led by:
