Ruha Benjamin: Who Owns the Future? Reimagining Education from Artificial Intelligence to Abundant Imagination

From automated decision systems in healthcare, policing, education and more, technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight.

When it comes to AI, Ruha shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives. In so doing, she considers how higher education is ground zero for re-imagining and re-tooling the default settings of technology and society.