ΑΙhub.org
 

The Good Robot Podcast: featuring Lorraine Daston

by
17 November 2022



share this:
Space scene with words Good Robot Podcast

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, Eleanor and Kerry talk to Lorraine Daston about the exorcism of emotion in rational science (and AI).

Lorraine Daston on the exorcism of emotion in rational science (and AI)

In this episode, the historian of science Lorraine Daston explains why science has long been allergic to emotion, which is seen to be the enemy of truth. Instead, objective reason is science’s virtue. She explores moments where it’s very difficult for scientists not to get personally involved, like when you’re working on your pet hypothesis or theory, which might lead you to select data that confirms your hypothesis, or when you’re confronted with some anomalies in your dataset that threaten a beautiful and otherwise perfect theory. But Lorraine also reminds us that the desire for objectivity can itself be an emotion, as it was when Victorian scientists expressed their heroic masculine self-restraint. She also explains why we should only be using AI for the parts of our world which are actually predictable, and how it’s not just engineers who debug algorithms, now that task is being outsourced to us – the consumers – as we’re the ones who are now forced to flag downstream effects when things go wrong.

Listen to the episode here:

For the reading list and transcript for this episode, visit The Good Robot website.

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Her work focuses on the history of rationality, especially but not exclusively scientific rationality. She has written on the history of wonder, objectivity, observation, the moral authority of nature, probability, Cold War rationality, and scientific modernity. Her current book projects are a history of the origins of the scientific community and a reflection on what science has to do with modernity.

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry Mackereth are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.




The Good Robot Podcast




            AIhub is supported by:


Related posts :



The Machine Ethics Podcast: featuring Marc Steen

In this episode, Ben chats to Marc Steen about AI as tools, the ethics of business models, writing "Ethics for People Who Work in Tech", and more.
06 June 2023, by

On privacy and personalization in federated learning: a retrospective on the US/UK PETs challenge

Studying the use of differential privacy in personalized, cross-silo federated learning.
05 June 2023, by

VISION AI Open Day: Trustworthy AI

Watch the roundtable discussion on trustworthy AI, with a focus on generative models, from the AI Open Day held in Prague.
02 June 2023, by

PeSTo: an AI tool for predicting protein interactions

The model can predict the binding interfaces of proteins when they bind other proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, ions, and small molecules.
01 June 2023, by

Tetris reveals how people respond to an unfair AI algorithm

An experiment in which two people play a modified version of Tetris revealed that players who get fewer turns perceive the other player as less likeable, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm allocates the turns.
31 May 2023, by

AIhub monthly digest: May 2023 – mitigating biases, ICLR invited talks, and Eurovision fun

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with AI research, events and news from the month past.
30 May 2023, by





©2021 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence


 












©2021 - ROBOTS Association