Provocations

Artificial intelligence is emerging as an important element in almost every aspect of human life. Yet little has been said or done about the overall implications of this huge leap forward in technology. How will electoral procedures be protected from interference? Can any semblance of individual privacy be preserved in democratic settings, let alone authoritarian ones? Even the simplest questions still plague us: will we be able to control the intelligent machines we’ve created? will they outwit us?; will we rely on them for the most important things? (Hint: we already do.)

At the Forum for the Academy and the Public’s 6th annual conference, The Future of the Future: The Ethics and Implications of AI, experts and thinkers of all kinds will come together to discuss these and other AI issues — for example, AI’s effects on climate, work, art, medicine, and war — and to help us understand what awaits the planet as humanity moves into a problematic technological future. Science fiction writers Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow; digital and human rights activists An Xiao Mina, Rebecca MacKinnon and Vidushi Marda; and IBM Master Inventor Neil Sahota, along with journalists, legal scholars and anthropologists, will join us to delve deeply into the ethics and implications of artificial intelligence.

LARB has invited participants in The Future of the Future: The Ethics and Implications of AI to provide introductory thoughts and ideas for the 2020 iteration of Provocations that will prepare the ground for the debates and discussions at the conference on February 21 and February 22.

Provocations began as a LARB series produced in conjunction with “What Cannot Be Said: Freedom of Expression in a Changing World,” a conference cosponsored by UCI, USC, and UCLA in January of 2016.