Questions about the ethical design of AI have taken on a particular urgency. The need to think carefully and widely about the ethical underpinnings of such systems as underscored by issues such as pervasive algorithmic bias against women, minorities, and the poor; the automation of systems for evaluating human behavior; and the use of machine systems to perform lethal policing of human lives.
The flaws ingrained in the current trajectory of AI development are the result of Western rationalist epistemologies, and such ways of knowing are not a sufficient foundation on which to adequately, robustly and humanely conceptualize intelligence, much less attempt to replicate it. What is required are more expansive imaginations, frameworks, and languages to effectively engage with the new machine ontologies.
This public conversation will provide a moment for the Abundant Intelligences coLAB to reflect on their collective time in residency and share some of their immediate take-aways as they consider the relationship between indigenous communities and emergent technologies, and the interest in co-designing such systems, in part to ensure that the technology is used to the benefit of these communities who have a long traditions of both technical innovation and innovative knowledge frameworks that contain rich conceptual tools for understanding deep and rich relationships with other-than-humans.
Questions to be discussed include: What should our relationship with AI be? How can Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies contribute to the global conversation regarding society and AI? How do we imagine a future with AI that contributes to the flourishing of all humans and non-humans? How can the answers to such questions translate into design guidelines for those building AI?
The Abundant Intelligences Residency will provide a sustained period of individual and collective engagement with creative responses to the challenge of designing AI systems that support Indigenous flourishing. The goal will be to produce future imaginaries that illustrate the abundant diversity of how humans interact intelligently with the world, and to illuminate how such intelligences might be expressed through computational systems.
The Residency will build on the model created by the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (IP AI) Workshops held in the winter/spring of 2019. The Residency will be Indigenous-led with a majority of Indigenous participants, be international in scope, use Indigenous methodologies that prioritize community health and well-being, and be widely transdisciplinary, with artists, scholars, and technologists working from community, academic and industry contexts. The IP AI workshops also highlighted how art helps makes different protocols, frameworks, and practices legible across communities, disciplines and scales, and that it is a core critical method for meeting the challenge of how to effectively imagine futures that entail deeply transdisciplinary thinking.
Abundant Intelligences Residency - Expanding the (Indigenous) AI Imaginary is supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation, hosted by the Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo Arts Center and produced in collaboration with the Indigenous Futures Research Centre.