Professor Alan Winfield is a roboticist, a roboethicist, but above all he is a humanist. “I am of course interested in robots but I’m much more interested in people." Alan is Professor of Robot Ethics at UWE (https://people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/AlanWinfield).
Alan has kindly accepted my invitation to come and talk with us informally - a fireside chat - about the human and energy cost of AI and perhaps discuss the question he posed in a recent blogpost, "How can we, as ethical consumers, justify continuing to make use of unsustainable and unethical AI technologies?".
In his blog (see link below), Alan wrote:
"So what does an AI ethicist do? Well, the short answer is worry. I worry about the ethical and societal impact of AI on individuals, society and the environment...I want to share two serious new worries with you. The first is about the energy cost of AI...the [second is the] human cost of AI. It is often said that one of the biggest fears around AI is the loss of jobs. In fact the opposite is happening. Many new jobs are being created, but the tragedy is that they are not great jobs, to say the least.
Let me introduce you to two of these new kinds of jobs [tagging and content moderation]...The big revelation to me over the past few months is the extent to which AI has a human supply chain, and I am an AI insider! The genius designers of this amazing tech rely on both huge amounts of energy and a hidden army of what Mary L. Gray [an anthropologist at Microsoft] and Siddhartha Suri call Ghost Workers."
*** Please note that Alan will be bringing his dog (for anyone who has a fur allergy or doesn't like dogs).
Agenda
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18:00 - 18:30 - Arrive, grab a drink and a seat
18:30 - 19:30 - Fireside chat with Alan, in conversation with Dawn Walter, anthropologist and Founder of the Anthropology + Technology Conference.
19:30 - 20:30 - Carry on chatting/drinking informally.
Further reading
===============
"Energy and Exploitation: AIs dirty secrets". Alan Winfield's June 2019 blog post: http://alanwinfield.blogspot.com/2019/06/
Alan Winfield - Paving the way for ethical robots: https://blogs.uwe.ac.uk/research-business-innovation/alan-winfield-paving-the-way-for-ethical-robots/
Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18563284/mary-gray-ghost-work-microwork-labor-silicon-valley-automation-employment-interview
Behind the Screen by Sarah T Roberts: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/18/behind-the-screen-sarah-t-roberts-review
Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes by Karen Hao (MIT Technology Review): https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/
Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.pdf
AI and the Climate Crisis by Alex Moltzau, who was a guest keynote at the Anthropology + Technology 2019 Conference: https://www.anthtechconf.co.uk/news/ai-the-climate-crisis