Beyond Buzzwords: From Artificial Intelligence to Collective Wisdom | Ruha Benjamin

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, emerging technologies have the potential to hide, scale, and deepen inequities, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight. In so doing, she will demonstrate how teaching and learning are ground zero for reimagining and retooling the default settings of technology and society.
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), the 2023 winner of the Stowe Prize, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. She recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto.