Farewell to our Outgoing Postdoctoral Fellows
“I am just taken aback by how incredible the postdoc opportunity has been,” explained Michael Ball-Blakely, General Ethics Postdoc Fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. “I came here expecting it to be an incredible, rigorous intellectual opportunity to learn and grow from the postdocs, staff, and faculty involved, but what I was completely surprised by was that it was also the most welcoming space I've ever been a part of. I learned and grew so much in my nine months here.”
Ball-Blakely is one of the four postdoctoral fellows to whom the Center says a bittersweet farewell as the academic year ends. Valerie Soon, Brett Karlan, and Diana Acosta Navas are the other three postdoc fellows moving to new positions. Read about their research and next career steps below.
During his fellowship, Ball-Blakely expanded his work on immigration, which he views from the perspectives of global justice, economic justice, and social equality to ask: “How can we tether immigrants to the justice claims of citizens in ways that illuminate the shared commonalities between the least advantaged individuals in both the low-income sending countries and the high-income receiving countries to incentivize a global justice movement that disrupts the global talent pyramid where the privileged, wealthy and White can move anywhere while other people can't?” One way Ball-Blakely makes this situation concrete is by connecting skill-selective immigration policies to the negative consequences of brain drain on the low-income sending country’s population — fewer doctors and nearly the same number of individuals who need care, for instance — and on the high-income receiving country’s citizenry, because domestic governments can be less motivated to educate their own populace and guarantee equality of opportunity.
At the University of Texas at El Paso, Ball-Blakely will be an assistant professor of philosophy, where he will expand his consideration of international brain drain to include domestic brain drain where people move from rural Mississippi, for example, to cities like Seattle, San Francisco or New York. Ball-Blakely will also develop his interrogation of relational egalitarianism and open borders and “the status harms that result when previously open pathways to migration are closed and would-be immigrants have started to emulate and identify with the cultures and economic practices of high-income receiving countries, making them less satisfied with options in their domestic country of origin and dismissive of the world and people they’re now trapped in and with.”
Equality of opportunity also concerns General Ethics Postdoc Fellow, Valerie Soon. Extending the social sorting questions she addressed in her dissertation (the tendency of people to self-sort into networks where everyone is like them), Soon is now studying the ways that our networks seem to be sorted geographically as well, which contributes to spatial inequality. She contends that “the concentration of opportunity in different geographic spaces ends up shaping social networks in ways that are either more or less conducive to freedom.” Pushing against the idea that the state’s primary mechanism for achieving equality should be enabling individuals to move to opportunity — i.e., if someone lives in a poor rural region, we should make it easy for them to move to the city — Soon argues that “that's insufficient, and it misses the point of the problem. The question is, why are opportunities concentrated in particular places? It's not a brute economic fact, or at least, if it is an economic fact, we can shape policies to mitigate those forces. People's associations, as well as their other life plans, are often indexed to places, so any egalitarian policy has to take that into account.”
Soon is going to the University of California at San Diego as an assistant professor of political science in the fall. She is excited to join a department that combines the philosophy of social science, political theory and political philosophy and have “the opportunity to use conceptual tools to help social scientists, as well as policymakers, think about the implications of normative research and the concepts they use.” She will continue to work on analyzing measurements of segregation — indices of segregation that measure the level of segregation in a particular geographic region, usually the city relative to a region or a neighborhood relative to a city — to determine to what extent these segregation indices actually capture the underlying values that make segregation a moral concern.
The importance of particular spaces also fascinates Diana Acosta Navas, an Embedded Ethics Postdoc Fellow at the Center in partnership with the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the Computer Science Department. Curious about the tensions between free speech and other democratic values, Acosta Navas has been digging into online forums and content moderation, especially automated content moderation, and “connecting the messy discussions related to free speech and democratic values to the other very messy discussions about algorithmic decision making. I’ve been examining what it would mean for a digital platform to actually uphold the social value of free speech, not just the legal First Amendment free speech protections.” She argues that because information on digital forums is now curated for users for a very specific purpose, these platforms are no longer a “marketplace of ideas as imagined by classic liberals.” To support the social value of free speech, “platforms must do more than just remove the most dangerous content, they must be designed to create affordances that actively promote dialogue and the consideration of diversity of viewpoints.”
Acosta Navas’s other projects include using an Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub grant to organize a convening of scholars to discuss how platform architecture can be used to mitigate conflict, as well as collaborating with a large team of computer scientists on a benchmarking project for language models, focusing on the models’ abilities’ to power disinformation campaigns. Finally, she has been continuing her work on transitional justice, helping Colombian civil rights leader and journalist Jineth Bedoya, design a center for victims of sexual violence, one component of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ ruling against the Colombian state for failing to provide Judicial Redress for victims of sexual violence.
Acosta Navas has been hired as an assistant professor of business ethics by Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan business school. One of the courses she’s looking forward to teaching is about AI ethics, and what business students will need to pay attention to as versions of large language models are adopted in the private sector. She also hopes to be involved in the area of business and human rights — the role of business in peace processes and transitional justice — asking how business can promote the goals of transitional justice and peacebuilding.
Brett Karlan, an Interdisciplinary Ethics Fellow in partnership with HAI, has also been considering how our technological environment shapes human behavior and epistemologies. “Philosophers, all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, thought that to be fully rational and to have the ability to act on our values, we need to have certain basic intellectual, as well as practical, capacities. So the real head turner with Chat GPT in particular, and generative AI more broadly, is understanding what these technologies are doing,” Karlan observes. “Are they helping us extend capacities that we already have and just making us more efficient and smarter? Or are they going to undermine important capacities that we need to be fully formed agents? Is it ok for college freshmen, for instance, to use Chat GPT to provide them with a basic structure for their essays, or is being able to formulate an effective structure for their writing and thinking an essential function?”
These deep philosophical questions that intersect with the particulars of a technology and what matters to us as human beings are what motivates his work. He argues that concerns about logic games such as chess and AlphaGo are overblown because human players are using AI to improve their abilities rather than erode their basic capacities. Karlan asserts that “we should be trying to figure out how to implement that kind of learning in the case of ChatGPT. Ultimately, in one way, I don’t think that the discussion about AI is unique. Rather, we need to be coming up with norms for all information technologies — social media, mobile phones, Zoom, and more — AI is just forcing us to more rapidly consider how we can be the kinds of creatures we want to be in this technological environment.”
Starting this August, Karlan will be an assistant professor of philosophy at Purdue University. He will continue to build his research program in the philosophy of AI, as well as build and teach courses in the university’s new bachelor's of arts in AI program. In working with this cross-disciplinary degree program within Purdue’s philosophy department and engineering and computer science schools, Karlan will help build a curriculum that addresses AI not just as a technical problem, but as a humanistic issue.
Donna Hunter is a freelance writer, editor, and tutor living in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and was an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric.