Faculty Research Fellow
Beth Coleman (Ph.D. New York University, 2004) is an Associate Professor of Data & Cities at the University of Toronto, where she directs the City as Platform lab. Working in the disciplines of Science and Technology Studies and Black Studies, her research focuses on machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement. Professor Coleman is the author of Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011) as well as many articles and several white papers. Her current monograph in progress is Hello Data: Rise of the Networked City (proposal under review, MIT Press).
Fellowship Project—Thinking the Limits: AI Unbound
In what way might it be productively disruptive to think through the “limits” of artificial intelligence (AI). Implicitly, one finds in the call for an ethical AI or an unbiased or fair AI a condition of a limit. Advanced automation may have a place in a post-industrial military industrial complex, but that should not be the in the form of a military “killer robot.” Algorithmic sorting can effectively produce types and categories, but that sorting should not reproduce a racist logic. And yet, the empirical difficulty of distinguishing the method and trajectory of the automated outcome—the black box state of current machine learning—broadly impacts the application of AI technology from the quotidian to the exceptional event. This research investigates the idea of a “limit” to AI across several critical paradigms, including AI and machine learning, black studies, philosophy of technology, and science and technology studies toward the goal of recalibrating AI from the reinscription of preconditioned harm (negative bias, etc.) toward potential liberatory functions (generative states of being and understanding). This project contributes to a Humanities critical engagement of AI by stepping from the framework of correction and toward the generative. This research asks, what if we looked at ethics as a mode of radical or decolonial AI?