Conversación de libros (10/11 de marzo de 2022) Datos discriminatorios por Wendy Chun

febrero 15, 2022

 

Book Conversation: Discriminating Data by Wendy Chun

In dialogue with Yuk Hui

 

Thu 10 March 2022, 5pm PST / Fri 11 March 2022, 9am HKT

Online Event: Register to join via Zoom

Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/304BhrtRH

 

In this event, Wendy Chun will discuss her latest book Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press) in conversation with Yuk Hui.

In Discriminating Data, Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighbourhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.

How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.

 

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.

Suscríbete a nuestro Newsletter


Previo

Seminario de Investigación Diálogos en Filosofía y Tecnología VI (22 de febrero de 2022) Henning Schmidgen: Normatividad maquínica

Próximo

Diálogos en Filosofía y Tecnología Seminario de investigación VII (16/17 de marzo de 2022) Andrew Feenberg: Sentido y Existencia

Latest from Evento

Conferencias (5 al 7 de diciembre de 2022): Pensamiento incompatible: el legado y su recursividad

北藝大博班實驗室2022系列演講II 【不相容的思想:遺產及其遞歸】 許煜訪台系列講座 〖Incompatible Thought: Legacy and its Recursivity〗 時間:2022年12月5日、6日、7日,14:00-17:00 地點:國立臺北藝術大學 基進講堂(圖書館3F,入口位於圖書館正門前石階左側) 講題:〈斯蒂格勒與後歐洲哲學〉、〈何謂亞洲?一個提問〉、〈機器與戰爭〉 報名連結:https://forms.gle/hqojhwcUHYd1HRGV6 (由於場地座位有限,煩請填寫) 「我不會說新的技術思想必然出自亞洲,而非歐洲,但我相信這類新思想只會出現在思想體系之間的不相容,因為兩者間的不相容造就出思想自身的個體化,同時避開從屬與支配關係。然而歐洲是否對此做好了準備?對我來說,再次闡明今天哲學、技術和地緣政治學之間的關係極為重要,然而今天我們仍然缺乏思考。」(21世紀的控制論 –—《遞歸與偶然》 洛文克訪談許煜) “One does not inherit a

Go toTop