IEEE TEMS: "Digital Humanism and Democracy in Geopolitical Context" DigHum-Series

#digital #humanism #AI #ethics

Date and time: Tuesday, June 15, 2021 at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Topic: “Digital Humanism and Democracy in Geopolitical Context”
(scroll down for abstract and CV)

Speaker: Allison Stanger (Middlebury College, USA)
Moderator & Respondent: Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University, USA)

To participate via Zoom go to: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)

The talk will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/digitalhumanism

For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://dighum.ec.tuwien.ac.at/news-events

ABSTRACT for June 15 “Digital Humanism and Democracy in Geopolitical Context”:

Government and corporate surveillance in autocracies have very different ethical ramifications than the same actions do in liberal democracies. Open societies protect individual rights and distinguish between the public and private spheres. Neither condition pertains in China, an instantiation of what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls private government. Ignoring the significance of such differences, which are only reinforced by differing business-government relationships in the United States, EU, and China, is likely to undercut both liberal democratic values and US-European national security.

Short Bio of Allison Stanger:

Allison Stanger is 2020-21 SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress; Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Chinese edition under contract) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press). Stanger’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post. She has been called to testify before Congress on five occasions and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Stanger received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Short Bio of Moshe Y. Vardi:

With over 50,000 citations, Moshe Vardi is one of the most cited computer scientists worldwide. Since 1993, Moshe Vardi has been a professor at Rice University (Texas, USA). He is a leading researcher in the field of logic applications in computer science and plays a leading role in the discussion of the role of computer science in society. The lectures and articles by Moshe Vardi on the implications of robotics and artificial intelligence (up to the question of whether intelligent robots are stealing your job) have strongly influenced public discourse. Until 2017, he served as Editor‐in‐Chief of Communications of the ACM (CACM). Moshe Y. Vardi studied Physics and Computer Science at BarIlan University and at Weizmann Institute. He received his doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Israel). He spent several years in various positions at top institutions such as the Hebrew University, Stanford University and the IBM Research Center in San Jose (USA).