Public LecturebyNoopurRaval2.2.237 pm CETonline (please register with
sonja.prendinger@univie.ac.at )
Wearepleasedtoannouncethefollowingpubliclectureaspartofthisyear'sDigiGovWinterSchool"Digitalpracticesandglobalinequalities
"
:
*The Algorithm is a Convenient Lie: Rethinking expertise and
invisibility to support decolonial digital practice *
Noopur Raval, PhD
"As AI, machine learning and algorithmic processing get more and more
embedded in our digitally mediated communications and transactions, it
has become necessary to interrogate algorithms as political and social
objects. One critique that scholars and journalists offer is to point at
a so-called AI or automated system and reveal the actually low-paid
humans behind the AI - often brown and black bodies especially from the
majority of the world engaged in supposedly boring and repetitive work
to make the fantasy of automation and intelligence look real. We are in
a moment where multiple critiques of AI, techno-colonialism and labor
exploitation have emerged.
My talk responds to this moment in two parts. Firstly, drawing on my
past ethnographic research with appbased gig workers in India, I will
talk about how algorithmic systems are made to function smoothly through
the work of a variety of human actors. Through these various platform
encounters, I will show what forms of expertise and agency are
attributed to ‘the algorithms’ as a convenient opaque object and
in-turn, what is obscured. The second part of the talk asks - what next?
What do we do after we have located the hidden human workers of AI,
where do we go from here? I unpack the uneven global relations that
shape the political economy of AI and argue against the mode of
sentimentalism, to instead pay attention to contingencies and diverse
infrastructural realities to decolonize critical AI thinking and
activist and creative responses to the rise of AI."
Readings:
Raval, Noopur: An Agenda for Decolonizing Data Science. In: spheres:
Journal for Digital Cultures. Spectres of AI (2019), Nr. 5, S. 1–6. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13499
Ranjit Singh (2021): The decolonial turn is on the road to contingency,
Information, Communication & Society, DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986104
Toparticipate,pleaseregisterbysendinganemailtosonja.prendinger@univie.ac.at.
Youwillreceiveanaccesslinktothelecture.
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