Katz Distinguished Lecture
Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of “AI”: The View from the Humanities
Emily M. Bender
The production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as “ground truth” even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human.
Emily M. Bender is the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology. She is the co-author of recent influential papers such as “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data” (ACL 2020) and “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” (FAcct 2021) and the book (with sociologist Dr. Alex Hanna) The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.
In her public scholarship, Bender brings linguistic insights to lay audiences to cut through the hype about “AI” and facilitate understanding of the actual functionality of the systems being sold under that name. In 2022 she was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and in September 2023 she was included in the first-ever TIME100AI list highlighting 100 individuals advancing major conversations about how AI is reshaping the world.
The Simpson Center for the Humanities is a proud sponsor of this event. Video editing was provided by Communications Manager at the Simpson Center, Carrie Bassett.
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