[Petit Fours #419] On responsibility, illegitimate practice, and retiring
Hi, everyone! With an inkling of winter weather in the air, it’s time to get another week started. Here’s what I’ve got for you today:
#1 Alex Taylor will give a seminar on The Operationalising of Responsibility at Digital Futures (on-site and via Zoom) on March 6 at 1pm CET. Free and open to the public, no registration required! Alex will talk about his upcoming fieldwork investigating the outsourced labours and operational logics associated with red teaming: “Currently linked to responsible AI (RAI) programmes across the tech sector, red teaming is being touted as a way to identify weaknesses in language and multi-modal AI models through adversarial or provocative prompts. My fieldwork will take place across so-called ‘data enrichment’ centres in the Philippines -- In preparation for this work, I’ll use this talk to think with an audience about some of the assumptions behind and controversies surrounding red teaming. I’ll begin by elaborating on ways red teaming is being approached and put into practice in R&D. I’ll then set this technical work in a wider context of RAI in the sector to raise and invite questions about the adequacy of a ‘solution’ that continues to valorise technological innovation whilst failing to reward or indeed recognise the extractive conditions necessary for AI’s proliferation.”
#2 On a related note, Legitimating Illegitimate Practices: How Data Analysts Compromised Their Standards to Promote Quantification is an interesting article by Ryan Stice-Lusvardi, Pamela J. Hinds, and Melissa Valentine that reports findings from a 20-month ethnography of data analysts at a financial technology company to explain how they came to legitimate practices that they actually considered illegitimate.
#3 For something completely different, I found these blogposts by Lada Adamic fascinating: Why I retired talks about her choice to leave Meta, and What retirement is like for me reflects on what she is doing now, instead. This, in particular, stuck with me: “But still the calculation changes a bit if one suspects that this is the best things are going to be for a while, and one can either stop and enjoy these things, or trudge through hoping that there will still be opportunity to enjoy something once the trudgery is over.”
#4 All capable of reading in Finnish (with or without machine translation) deserve to hear the good news that Veikko Eranti has started a newsletter!
-A