Radical AI - Our Values and Foundation
Radical AI is a platform born out of a simple value statement: Artificial Intelligence technology development, application, and coverage must be ethical. The value statement argues that development, application, and coverage must be ethical (not “should” be ethical) because if they are not ethical there is immense potential for harm to people, the planet, and all sentient life. If Artificial Intelligence technology and society’s relationship to it does not adapt to be ethical the consequences have the potential to amplify current systems of oppression, inequality, and harm to an unprecedented scope.
But what does it mean for development, application, and coverage to be ethical? The Radical AI project is fundamentally a project to actively define this question. Through being a platform hosting dialogue between industry, academia, consumers, developers, and all groups who are impacted regularly by AI, Radical AI strives to redefine ethics to adapt to the interdisciplinary and intersectional needs of our complex world.
The vision for Radical AI as a business is to center the voices of those whose voices have historically been marginalized in the AI Ethics conversation. We are bold in naming those groups who we strive to lift up: women, people of color, neurologically diverse folks including folks experiencing or researching the intersection between mental health and technology, people who fit outside of a heteronormative gender binary, just to name a few. The goal of Radical AI is to use the organization’s platform to highlight radical ideas, radical people, and radical stories in the multitude of spaces that currently make up AI development, application, and coverage. We desire to be a coverage platform that is bold, professional, and pushes the status quo of the AI Ethics conversation to greater levels of representation and nuance.
However, though Radical AI is a platform attempting to construct something new in the world of AI Ethics there are several grounding theories and publications that form the bedrock of our theoretical positionality. Below are ten theorists currently producing seminal AI Ethics research and an example of their research or thinking that we particularly enjoyed. Radical AI draws from these theorists and their research regularly to inform our work and our working definitions. These folks and their ideas are included here not as an exhaustive list of everything that drives this project, but a useful starting point to orient you to the work we are embarking on and who we are in conversation with. In no particular order:
1. Dr. Kathryn Hume – Applying Humanities Skills at Work
2. Dr. Timnit Gebru - 5 Takeaways About the State of Artificial Intelligence - University of Pennsylvania Interview
3. Dr. Roopika Risam - What Passes for Human? Undermining the Universal Subject in Digital Humanities Praxis
4. Abeba Birhane - Algorithmic Injustices: Towards a Relational Ethics
5. Dr. Kate Darling - “Who's Johnny?” Anthropomorphic Framing in Human-Robot Interaction, Integration, and Policy
6. Dr. Hannah Wallach (And MSR FATE) - Improving fairness in machine learning systems: What do industry practitioners need?
7. Dr. Kate Crawford - Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data and Justice
8. Dr. Meredith Whittaker - Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI
9. Dr. Philip Butler - Black Transhumanism and Posthumanism - NYU Interview
10. Dr. Danah Boyd - Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems
Each of these visionary scholars are grappling with the web of AI Ethics in profound and revolutionary ways. Coming from a diversity of fields and representing a plethora of identities, their personal and professional work continues to be a north star for the Radical AI project. The lenses their publications invite the field of AI Ethics to look through are quintessentially radical and are a model for the conversations we hope to engender through the Radical AI platform.
Do you know other people we should be reading who might be doing work in AI Ethics that you would consider radical? We would love to add them to our reading list or interview them for our bi-weekly podcast. Feel free to email us at anytime at podcast@radicalai.org or tweet us @radicalaipod
-Stay Radical!
Dylan Doyle-Burke & Jess Smith
