2025 Lincoln Center Visiting Scholar Lecture: 'Opening AI’s Black Box and Finding a Baby'

February 27, 2025 | Arizona State University, Memorial Union 230

Join the Lincoln Center as we welcome Dr. Anna Lauren Hoffmann for her lecture on artificial intelligence, ethics, and desirable technological futures: "Opening AI's Black Box and Finding a Baby." 

Lecture Description

The popularization of AI and other “learning machines” has been accompanied by a proliferation of initiatives to promote their ethical, responsible, or “human-centered” development and use. But who acts as the “responsible” party within these initiatives? Who is linked to these visions of an “ethical” or desirable technological future with AI? Or, more simply: who does “ethical AI” want us to be?
 
In this talk, Anna Lauren Hoffmann shows how popular projects of ethical and responsible AI are underwritten—and limited—by liberal ideals of and metaphors for maturation, child development, and moral education. She argues that these initiatives promote a kind of domesticated and progressive personhood that, paradoxically, disavows the ethical responsibility of individuals and organizations. Against these “positive” projects, she suggests renewing the critical force of negativity to understand the self as an ethical subject and recover the possibility of refusal.

Speaker Information

Dr. Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Associate Professor with the Information School at the University of Washington. She is the co-founder and co-director of the UW iSchool's AfterLab and a Senior Fellow with the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. Dr. Hoffman is a leading figure in technology ethics and data feminism. Her work combines philosophy, critical theory, feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory with her training in informatics to interrogate how ethics, values, and norms are (or are not) articulated relative to data and information technologies.

This is a hybrid event. To join us virtually via Zoom, choose the "virtual" option on the registration page. Virtual attendees will receive the Zoom link 24 hours before the event begins.

This event is co-sponsored by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at New College, the Social Data Science program, and the School of Social Transformation.