Resources on AI and the future of computing?

January 3, 2021 1:39 PM

Can you help me find resources for students on AI, machine learning, big data and the social implications of future computing?

I am continuing to crowd-source my high school Intro to Comp Sci class (previously), thanks in advance.

I'd like my students to think deeply about issues with big data, machine learning, neural networks, AI in general, and some idea of the future dilemmas around the computer as expert system and beyond. Ideally the students would each take on some different aspect of the issue and we will jigsaw their parts into a shared resource.

I enjoyed this documentary on Alpha Go, but it's feature length and a bit sunshiny about the party line (it's Google-made). So articles, cartoons, talks, mini-documentaries, hands-on explorations are all most welcome.

Please feel free to think expansively; there are dozens of related issues in this field, and anything you would wish to put in front of young minds is certainly of interest to me.

posted by argybarg to Education (8 answers total)

Filed under hands-on exploration, I’m here to recommend NVIDIA Corporations Deep Learning Institute. They link to a lot of great resources and intro materials which may be useful for exploring what AI is used for and what some of the current areas of open work are.
posted by rw at 2:01 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

There's the book, Weapons of Math Destruction.
posted by oceano at 2:05 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Seconding Cathy O'Neil's book Weapons of Math Destruction! It's fascinating. The individual chapters are quite cohesive, so you could give them to different students, if you wanted.

I've personally written about measuring the failures of policing algorithms.
posted by yarntheory at 2:12 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

During the last few years the United Nations has had repeated meetings and conventions about Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (“LAWS”, may or may not involve technologies categorized as AI) frantically trying to figure out how international arms regulations and things like the Geneva Conventions should apply to their trafficking, technology proliferation, and garrison and battlefield uses. So UN web sites can provide lots of resources themselves and links to academic and governmental resources, frex:

• Stereotypically exciting ~4 min. video intro to a 2018 meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on LAWS
• list of meetings and publications from Geneva office
• overview article in UN Chronicle
• Human Rights Watch report from August of the positions different nations have taken

A point I always make when discussing this stuff is that it's not like in the movies: humans don't have to create a malevolent conscious machine “Other” to destroy ourselves or cause holocausts with this technology; all we have to do is create a dumb-as-a-bag-of-bricks Sorcerer's Apprentice and lose control of it (or just let one faction of humans effectively use it, given our predilections in war.)

The LAWS category includes both hunter-killer type drone weapons and “sentry gun” weapons which the Pentagon classifies as “area denial”, a category which also includes (international-convention-banned) land mines.
posted by XMLicious at 3:06 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Something that might also be good for students: MeFi's Own™ cstross wrote and published a collection of short stories in 2005 called Accelerando (and released the ebook freely under a Creative Commons license, though I'm sure he'd appreciate any revenue you could direct his way) that contains a story “Tourist” that I think could be a good launching point for a variety of discussions if the students were to read all or part of it.

The main character of the stories set in the 21st century, Manfred Macx, is a sort of combination of an idealized Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman, a computer genius altruist who invents technology for the sheer geekjoy and benefit of humanity. At the beginning of “Tourist” he's mugged and the mugger steals his smart glasses. It turns out that Macx has, by this point in his life, created so many customized software programs and AI assistants which interleave with his ongoing thought processes that losing the glasses results in a type of cognitive impairment, while the glasses have some degree of a mind of their own and influence the mugger who tries to use them.

So I'd imagine that story as a starting point for students to talk about their own experiences losing their smartphones or phone service / internet access, why Google Glass didn't take off and whether it will in the future, what the differences between the turn of the century when Stross was writing and now are, what the future holds for technological devices being essential to daily life (see this 2019 FPP thread about how foreigners venturing into China usually find themselves shut out of the cashless technological-financial system for daily needs and constantly run into complicated stumbling blocks), etc.

For one of the many dark sides of technological integration in Chinese society see a 2019 FPP of mine on an HRW tear-down of a state security forces app.
posted by XMLicious at 5:10 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

AI Now Institute: "A research institute examining the social implications of artificial intelligence"

Data For Black Lives: "Data for Black Lives is a movement of activists, organizers, and mathematicians committed to the mission of using data science to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people."

Algorithmic Justice League: "We combine art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of AI."

Data & Society: "We produce original research on topics including AI and automation, the impact of technology on labor and health, and online disinformation."

Algorithms of Oppression - Safiya Umoja Noble (book)

Automating Inequality - Virginia Eubanks (book)

Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life - Ruha Benjamin (book)

Race After Technology - Ruha Benjamin (book)
posted by thebots at 5:22 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

For a ripped-from-the-headlines story you could talk about the draft paper that got Timnit Gebru forced out of Google a few weeks ago. The paper itself isn't online yet but there are a handful of stories out there that capture the gist, see e.g. this one. The paper itself is accepted to FAccT 2021 so should be readable online in early March, if not sooner.
posted by potrzebie at 5:26 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Welllll looks like all that careful work at the UN has been pitched out the window and my government wasn't satisfied with simply re-starting the nuclear arms race in this century:

US has 'moral imperative' to develop AI weapons, says panel

posted by XMLicious at 8:46 PM on January 27, 2021