Technomoral Conversations: What’s the Story with AI? AI Narratives and Counter-narratives
11th February 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM GMT
The Technomoral Conversations series brings together leaders, creators and innovators from academia, technology, business and the third sector in a ‘fireside chat’ format to discuss futures that are worth wanting.
Join us for the latest event in our Technomoral Conversations series: What’s the Story with AI? Exploring AI Narratives and Counter-Narratives.
During this fireside chat, we will hear critical insights from experts across academia and industry on the dominant narratives surrounding AI, and what alternative stories can be and are being told about AI and its place in our futures.
Chaired by Dr Alex Taylor (University of Edinburgh), this Technomoral Conversation will feature Dr Abeba Birhane (Trinity College Dublin), Professor Louise Amoore (Durham University), and John Thornhill (Financial Times)!
This event is a collaboration between the Centre for Technomoral Futures, the Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) Programme and Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Speaker Biographies
Dr Alex Taylor is a sociologist with a fascination for the relations between machines and social life, and what possibilities technoscientific entanglements might create for fundamental transformations in society. He’s currently a Reader in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and an AHRC BRAID fellow focusing on the operationalising of responsibility. He is also a fellow of the RSA, and holds visiting roles at the University of Sweden and City, University of London.
Dr Abeba Birhane founded and leads the TCD AI Accountability Lab (AIAL). She is an assistant professor of AI at the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin. Dr Birhane researches AI accountability with a particular focus on audits of AI models and training datasets – work for which she was featured in Wired UK and TIME on the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI list in 2023. Dr Birhane also served on the United Nations Secretary-General’s AI Advisory Body and currently serves at the AI Advisory Council in Ireland.
Louise Amoore is Professor of Human Geography and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life at Durham University, UK. She researches the politics of algorithms, the geopolitics of technology, biometric futures, and the ethics of machine learning systems. Her book, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Duke University Press, 2020) locates the ethics of algorithms in the partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. In her earlier work, including her book The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Duke University Press, 2013), Louise traces how probability and statistical calculation are reframed through algorithmic possibilities and forms of calculation. Louise’s current research is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and an ERC Advanced grant, ‘Algorithmic Societies’. She is an elected Fellow of the British Academy.
