Day: June 20, 2013

Men being artificially intelligent.

Jender29 Comments

Lots of them. (Thanks, P!)

Conference
PT-AI 2013 – “Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence”
21-22.09.2013
Oxford, St. Antony’s College
http://www.pt-ai.org/2013

I=========================================
NVITED SPEAKERS

Jean-Christophe Baillie (CSF, Aldebaran Robotics, Paris)
“AI: The Point of View of Developmental Robotics”
Theodore Berger (University of Southern California, L.A.)
Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY)
“What Does Watson 2.0 Tell Us About the Philosophy & Theory of AI?”
Daniel C. Dennett (Tufts University, Boston)
“If brains are computers, what kind of computers are they?”
Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire/University of Oxford)
“Enveloping the World – How Reality Is Becoming AI-Friendly”
Stuart J Russell (UC Berkeley)
“Rationality and Intelligence”
Murray Shanahan (Imperial College, London)
“Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and the Frame Problem”
Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling, Scotland)
“AI and Extended Cognition”

Implicit bias and the old boys’ network

jennysaul4 Comments

Kieran Healy has dramatically demonstrated just how much women are left out of citation networks in philosophy. I think it’s vital to do some hard thinking about what this means and what we can do about it. One reason it’s vital is that citation rates DO get used in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions. We need to make sure that the Healy data don’t just get used as a nice list of who should be getting job offers from leading departments. We need to see the data as what they almost certainly are: an illustration of implicit bias in action. We don’t have direct evidence for this, but it’s exactly what we’d predict from what we know about implicit biases. Just as the first names to leap to mind for your conference (or syllabus) are likely to be male, the first names to leap to mind for your bibliography are likely to be male.

Prompted by Healy’s work, Ross Cameron’s been reflecting eloquently on this on Facebook:

Looked at the bibliographies in my papers for the last few years. In almost all of them, I have citations to women, BUT (i) they are significantly outnumbered, more so than I expected and (ii) it tends to be the same women I’m citing again and again (more so, I think, than that it’s the same men I’m citing again and again).

Just like many of us have been making a conscious effort to invite women to workshops etc, and trying to think outside the box about who to invite (“Oh, Katherine Hawley, Karen Bennett and Laurie Paul are all busy. Better just have an all dude metaphysics workshop then!”) it seems clear that we need to also concentrate on making a conscious effort to cite women and to think outside the box about who to cite.

I am lazy about scholarship, no doubt about it, but there’s no excuse for laziness if that means you’re contributing to injustice. Time for the Gendered Citation Campaign!

I hereby urge you all to go look at your bibliographies, and– even more importantly– make sure you actively think about what women you should cite in current and future papers. Also: speak up when people use citation data to argue against hiring or promoting a woman. Show them the Healy data, and talk to them about implicit bias.

UPDATE: And when you’re refereeing, have a look at the references. If the author is leaving out women who should be in, suggest that they add them.