I have the video open on my computer and it started playing my own words back to me. It was vy confusing to stop our next spker is the author of black software e internet and Racial Justice. Is the Vice President of faculty engagement and developmenat new york university. And professor media, culture and communication at nyu Steinhardt School of the father for the center of critical race d indigenous studies based on finer stomach final speaker will be frank aauthor of the new laws of robotics defending Human Expertise in the age of aib stopped his professor of law atbrooklyn law school at affiliate llow at the Yale Information Society project and a member of the american law institute. Thank you. Im so happy to be on the panel with two authors i reay appreciate and with that topic im sure we all have so much to say about. There were many periods in time that i could look at as representative of what my ideals or best opportunities, i wanted to focus attention to 10 years ago, 12 years ag the time of the great recession, the last jor financial crisis and how it was a unique opportunity for Tech Companies to thrive. There were a number of moments familiar to a lot of people, and i imagine that is about the time the smart phone took off, that was about the time that because there waa financial crisis and because i had implications with not just wall street but real estate, there was a drive to invest elsewhere in certain shiny new industries popping up and location that is not in new rk. So with all of the elements coming together, another element was a lot of the lack of scrutiny thathese companies got, perhapsot on the level of the user because plenty of users abuse technologies has issues, had issues with facebook, but the opportunity to find a platform to discuss their problems, to discuss the many consequences they were feeling as users, there wasnt mh press about, there wasnt a lot of critical press. It was very difficult to place critical stories about technology in newspapers and magazines. And therwas just these think tankand academic researc ceers and its wonderful that they are all taking off but that theyve taken off in the past 10 years, this is relatively new. I want people to take a look back at the founding of these companies to see what problems perhaps where they are from the beginning so that hearing back considerably so that some ideas i wanted to throw out to begin. Great, charlton. Excellent, i think that is a great segue to some of my remarks and maybe will take a little bit more time and if the audience wi ai was thinking last nig about i really wanted to say and bring forward in this discussn to lead with i had th moment where i had the feeling i had written thes things before ai was collecting my thoughts and then i looked back into the book and looked at my intruction and found, i think i said it actually here and said it better. I want to read a short rt of the introduction to black software contexand then within two or three provocations that really lead us back to exactly where joannes comments ended, which is about, what do we do now and how do we proceed. The book of cose is black software, for me black softwa, hundreds of myriad ways we mobilize Computing Technology refers to t programs we desire and designed computers to run, refers to who designed the program for what purposes d what or whom becomes this object or data. Fers to how and how well the computer performs a task for which it was programmed. In this book i tell two black Software Stories the book i organized the book 1 and book 2. Is is where a group called the vanguard that i ite about begins to emerge. These are black hobbyists and entrepreneurs, digital organizersevangelists, activists, knowledge brokers and they positioned black folk black content, black culturto occupy the leading edge of the internet popular social deponent. So they e collective stories begin around the mid70s continue into the 80s and 90s during the advent of personal computing and early days of computer networking and air stories extend to the World Wide Web first and. Com booms first bus, the story demonstrate how black people have taken talkhnology abusing the technology to further our own purposes, our persal communal and political interests. But blk software is also a story about how Computing Technology was built and developed to keep america docile and in its place disproportionately disadvantaged,ocked up and marked for death. This is a story i unravel in book 2 and speaks tothem in various ways of those in power use computing of technology to destroy and nullify black agency and nullified black peoples hopes and dreams, aspirations and Human Potential and political interests. Limiting the heights we are meant to achieve. Book 2 begs in 1960 and really has to do with a group people i refer to as the commitemen and president Lyndon JohnsonsCrime Commission in 1965 who built new computing systems that were really directed at what was then seen as america preeminent problem, that was the problem of race and the problem of blackness. I and the introduction with these words in between the two versions of black software, the kind that positively impacts black peles lives and the kinds that stroy them, lives of both significant question which is not about recently popularized concepts like computer bias or fa algorithms or platform and equality or ethics. The queson goes to the heart of the matter that the concepts skirt around. Will our current and future technological tools enable us to outrun White Supremacy . Ter all, this is not just our countrys founding principle, its also the core programming that preceded and animated th birth, development, and uses of our computational systems. Im often asked today, can we use technology to significantly advance the cause of rial justice and the aner is, only if we come to grips with the fact that our current technological environment and infrastructure was designed to support these efforts of Racial Justice and civil rights. I think that whathat means is that its incumbent ons to think about what it means, what it would mean to dismantle and rebuild our technical logical environment and infrastructure from the ground up that is inherently or at least more inherentlybent toward the cause of racial juice. So what does that mean . What does that look like thats a question that is very much a part of our future. Thank you. Thanks so much frank. Hank you christina, thank you so much to joan and charlton i think these projects are at the center of how we can rethink technology for soci justice. I think, in my book new laws of robotics, i will get to the new laws and a second but i want to give a reallconcrete example of w ai robotics might affect our everyday lives. We could use an old form of Job Interview to walk in and have an interew with someone to talk abouthings we fill out a form etc. And then either hired or not hired. There are now firms developing ai fial analysis and facial Recognition Systems that will parse microsecond by crosecond every emotion you ow, i shouldnt say emotion, i should say every w in which her face moves. How fast you blink. Do you smile or not . Things like that. Im sure weve all had selfconsciousne in dealing with the zoom universe in exactly this way. Whats really troubling about it is that these firms are saying, we can look at your existing employees, your top performers, and then see who and society matches the way that they speak, the way they sound, things like that, i think theres a uple of responses to that that i think, there is an initial response to be worried about it and part of my book is to arculate why we should bworried and the how to translate those worries into policies to improve things. I think of a first wave of worry is exactly along the lines of charless points about these systems being systematicly disadvantaging to minority ties groups in society. I think have to really watch carefully for this impact here. If we allow firms to use ai to essentially replicate themselves or replicate along certain lines, is it about really finding high peormance or about simply replicating the existing traits of the cuent . There is a second way that goes into the ideas of joae thinking what how you consider the computer to say that we might want to question the use of thatechnology altogether because we might find it safe to humanize it. Want to be evaluated on the basis of some personal interaction, i deserve that, thats the minimum i deserve. We have 10,000 applications for 20 slots, how are we supposed to screen them . They already use things like resume screeners, resume automated natural language processing, that can be troubling but i think its less troubling for the sort of thing that is analyzing peoples faces in ways that people really have no control over. Ople dont have any control over whether they blink 10 microseconds longer than they ould in order to get in position. And thinking about ai robotics, thats an ai application, later in the book i also try to develop a more hopeful vision for robotics as complements to professionals rather an substitutes. There is lots of places where rots can substitute human nature well, and eventually will do well. In many professions you really want to have the complementarity. Thats the first law of robotics, have ai robotics consummate professionals rather than replace them. The second is to avoid having the stems trying to counterfeit humanity so if theres box onli, dont allow them to pretend to be equal is not this is also rai serious civil rights concerns because you are right when groups that have put fake minority online that say we love president trump,thats a deeply troubling thing to see those sorts of bs impersonating people. My third thing about robotics is to stop arms ces and robotics. Theres many other forms of arms races think ai is comforti to. My fourth law of robotics is to require attribution for any ai robotics system. In the book but i essentially do is in the fields of law, medicine, journalism, education, and a few other fields, try to develop those and say whatould our laws and policies look like if we held riously to these principles in the new laws orobotics. I look forward to the discussion today. Thank you. Thanks everyone, if anyones watching this contemporaneously, i have my ey on the chat if there any questions. My questiois more aimed at the books of charlton and frfrank, part of the reason may be the reason that you see biased in technology is becaus its made by humans who are biased. So that raises the question of, does it help to focus more to say you shouldnt focus so much on technology we should focus on the people or people should ve more decisionmaking power because they are all from the same cause of the technology side. Viously the systems work differently i wawondering if both of you could speak to how you envision writinghe ship when the underlyinproblem zones arent necessaril problems are to abpeople are technology but the attitudes people that create both. That is a great question and one that i think about that do agree that when we think about where and what the fix is that its more with human beings than it is of technology and i think one of the thingthat we started to get geourselves into is thking nacvely that if we can abi think we make a miake thinking about things that way and i think one of the fundamental problems people are designing these kinds of systems, thinking about with franks example the facial requisition in the intervw and employment context how many of those folks are very well versed in the history and context of the face and what that means psychologicalland what historically those connections tween facial attributes anracial biases stereotypes etc. And then what kind of probms might that cause in aechnology that uses at to then infer something about your qualificions. I think that is where the disconnect is both in terms of dealing with individuals attitudes but also Historical Context around race, racism, all the things thateople have no idea about is easy to replicate when all you are thinking about is, i want to make a re efficient system to help me t through these resumes. I reay like that point about the history, i ink its something that is ideally going to be part of Computer Science education of the fure is to have a much larger role for understanding the hiory of the social context. I think when we look at the psychology of things li facial analysis program, its often really partial to a behaviorist model of an bottling humans as opposed to things thamight be more phenomenological or open to peoples lived experience in thnarrative about their exrience. Think to get to your question, christin part of my hope in writing on thitopic is to try to make it so people dont either we pick a robot or we have humans doing it but weve got this sociotechnical configuration of humans in robot anhow do we make that so it serves this process were ideally we n look at the way humans do statistically or things like bias, report back to people, you appear to be acng a certain way that is didvantaging certain members of community d then reacting but i want to see humans at the center of the process because i worry a bit about that happening its entirely Automated Press given the record of big Tech Companies that do the automation. Joanne, your comments he mentioned that if you go back a little bit in time it was hard to place essays orarticles that were critical on emerging technology, big Tech Companies, now that narrative is very much changing and changed. You would think the biggest villains in our society are often so of these very large companies. What do you attribute to th change and can learn something from it . Its funny because today is actually the 1h anniversary of the release of thissocial network im sure eveones heard of it the hollywood film about the foundingf facebook. I dont think its necessarily the best critism of facebook but it was hollywood film depiction at was up for academy award. That was 10 yes ago. Pretty commoy when i see news articles or Opinion Pieces now day, i see a very common beginning that will be like, 10 years ago Everyone Wants facebook. Everyone used to love facebook now they are afraid of it. This is a really common structurand i understand it as a writer because its a rhetorical technique to give your opponent credit before you go into the criticism. But the reason i hope people watching this who them selves mighbe a person to speak on these issues, keep in consideration that that is a narrative that marzuckerberg has crafted about facebook. He himself is someone who when he gets interviewed he says, all of this is very new criticis you all used to love us. So the ways that because a few people were documenting it back th, even though it was aba few people in ntrast with the number of users facebook had, i dont have a number off the top, even 10 years ago its user base, certainly would have counted as a major city in the united states. That something i want people to be aware of because if we belie in this idea of a beautiful past, thats very easy to get back to you, we have very surface level changes we can g back to that good place these Tech Companies were about what i would like others to consideinstead is just why do we have a company like facebook. Google search is very useful. So what cebook offers, they will tell you we are great becauswe let you connect with people. We let you do th, this, this, that is something the internet set self alrea let you do, that dont have to have the commercialized functions and targeted ads that weve placed in the middle. Everything that it offers you can do with the internet already. Also, everything it offers, some of its very useful functions say you need a facebook account to t updates on your School Committee meeting or your church, things related to your church. Wouldnt that all be better and decentralized space clear you are the moderator where the community is managing it to mackey isnt all of this water . I think about the commity newspapers thawere maybe they werent riving 10 years ago. When you think about the way that a commity newspaper might have had lot of alerts about yourchool, about your representatives, people from your tow now that facebook has taken over, youve got people lookingmorelobal when they look glal they get embroiled in things like conspiracies. I dont think you would have q1 unnecessarily in a committee newspaper 10 years ago. Im sure it couldve happened but it would have been been e same way facebk has facilitated. I wanted to wrap itp, i just wanteople to think about what do you actually get fm this and do we need it . Dont think we do. So the rhetorical question you are asking in your comments isnt it better on the community on a communities webpage or Something Like that, at some point you can talk about degree of free will. At some ways a lot of these are chosto represent on facebook instead of more decentralized means. What you attribute those reasons and can learn something from those choices if we think that ultimate those were in the wrong and thinking about some of what i read about in blk software which is this moment, albeit very brief in the mid90s where you had, what i like to call thisanalog to the soci media like facebook and so forth but in the aol wall garden and framework where i think there was still something characteristically and positively different there then the facebook meaning youould have a platform like the net nor thatas a site that was heavily populated by targeted to africanamericans. It gained a following and some commercial appeal and very successful in that way but people knew where they were going to get what they wanted without a filter. You had a Thriving Community like a Community Newspaper i could go therbecause i know, here is where im going to find my people, here is where i connect, get the news th i want and then other sitein the mid90s ecosystem that would help you through those old hyperlinks basically help you travel. If you want this that and the other, i can get you from here to that next site or this next site, they all have things that will be of inte