Growing Up in the Midst of the AI Goldrush: from Data Scares to Data Scars
Prof. Dr. Andra Siibak (University of Tartu, Estland)
About the lecture
Present day children’s futures are decided by algorithms predicting their probability of success at school, their suitability for a job position, their likely recidivism or mental health problems. Advances in predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) systems, behavioral-, and biometrics technologies, have started to be aggressively used for monitoring, aggregating, and analyzing children’s data. Such dataveillance happening both in homes, schools, and peer networks has a profound impact not only on children’s preferences, social relations, life chances, rights and privacy but also the “future of human agency - and ultimately, of society and culture “ (Mascheroni & Siibak 2021: 169).
Building upon the findings of my different empirical case studies, I will showcase how the popular digital parenting practices and the growing datafication happening in the education sector, could create not only hypothetical data scares but also lead to real data scars in the lives of the young.
About the speaker
Andra Siibak is a Professor of Media Studies, a Deputy Head of Research and Development and a Program Director of the Doctoral Curriculum in Media and Communication at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu. Her research focuses on opportunities and risks surrounding internet use, digital childhoods, datafication of education and privacy. Together with Giovanna Mascheroni she co-authored a monograph “Datafied Childhoods: Data Practices and Imaginaries in Children’s Lives” (2021, Peter Lang). Andra is a member of Film, Media, and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea and serves as the General Secretary of European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). From April-June 2023 Andra is a Fellow at the Hamburg Institute of Advanced Study (HIAS).
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This semester's edition of Taming the Machines sheds ligth on the ethical, political, legal, and societal dimensions of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
With AI technologies applied in markets, industry, law enforcement, but also office spaces, classrooms, and homes, it has become undoubtable that AI successfully seeped into the centres of our lifeworld. Amidst this sprawling digitisation, we might want to hit the pause button and take stock: to reflect on future AI, and accordingly upon how the foundations of human life – in all of its stages and all of its contexts – are in the process of being dramatically altered.
Despite an observable trend of AI further entrenching past injustices, endangering civil and human rights, and aggravating environmental and ecological challenges, the course of events also entails huge potentials. It might appear as a rare stroke of fortune that we are aware of the unfolding of a paradigm shift around us, leaving us with the possibility for steering our digital society in the direction of a better world.
Hence, this lecture series brings together perspectives from ethics, politics, law, geography, and media studies to assess the potential for preserving and developing human values in the design, dissemination, and application of AI technologies. How does AI challenge our most fundamental social, political, and economic institutions? How can we bolster (or even improve) them in times of technological disruption? What regulations are needed to render AI environments fairer and more transparent? What needs to be done to make them more sustainable? In what sense could (and even should) we hold AI accountable?
To explore these and other related questions, this public lecture series invites distinguished international researchers to present and discuss their work. To get the latest updates and details how to attend the lectures, please visit
http://uhh.de/inf-eit.
