"What keeps the world together? It's rules… people abiding by the terms" –'Repo Man'
This past May, I had the great privilege of being invited to lecture at NYU's Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture, and Communication as a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar. While there, I taught an interdisciplinary seminar called 'Building Better Humans' which focused on the legal and ethical implications of new and emerging technologies in the context of what I call the 'human-machine merger'. This presentation addresses some of the core concepts discussed during our time together.
Read more'Prediction, Presumption, Preemption: The Path of Law After the Computational Turn', forthcoming in Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, eds. Mireille Hildebrandt & Ekaterina De Vries.
This chapter examines the path of law after the computational turn. In framing my argument, I use Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s famous "bad man" theory as a heuristic device for evaluating predictive technologies currently embraced by public and private sector entities worldwide. Perhaps America's most famous jurist, Holmes was so fascinated by the power of predictions and the predictive stance that he made prediction the centerpiece of his own prophecies regarding the future of legal education. Holmes believed that predictions should be understood with reference to the standpoint of everyday people, made from their point of view and operationalized with their sense of purpose in mind.
Read moreThe Jeopardy! winning machine creates only the illusion of intelligence, writes Ian Kerr. But maybe that's the point
As many artificial intelligence aficionados have already made clear in the blogosphere, both before and after the match, Watson's victory does not meet the threshold of Turing's test. Not even close. Watson proved itself as an answer-generating machine par excellence. And, although Watson showed considerable computational skill in its ability to parse natural language, a conversationalist Watson was not. This reality was not lost on the IBM team. Hence the corporate choice to play Jeopardy! rather than address Turing's challenge head-on. So, if IBM's grand challenge was not to pass Turing's test, what exactly is going on here?
A quick romp through the sphere-o’-twits reveals what human-computer interaction specialists and the folks in Hollywood have understood for years: audiences can be engineered to like, love, lust for and trust machines like Watson better than human counterparts. And this is exactly what companies like IBM are counting on.
Read moreThe Jeopardy! winning machine creates only the illusion of intelligence, writes Ian Kerr. But maybe that’s the point.
Read moreIf Facebook were truly committed to protecting privacy, it would start with the assumption that people want less access to their information, not more
A couple of weeks ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrated his 26th birthday. Well, sort of. While he did indeed turn 26, it is reported that he was forced to cancel his Caribbean celebration to lead a series of emergency meetings on one of his least favourite topics: privacy.
These meetings resulted in significant alterations to the website's platform and user interface and a major media event that took place on Wednesday. Although numerous trusted media outlets, privacy advocates and politicians around the globe reported this event as "a privacy U-turn" (The Sun in Britain), an "about face" change (Economist), "a major step forward for privacy" (American Civil Liberties Association) and a "significant first step that Facebook deserves credit for," (Senator Charles Schumer), I am not so sure.
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