Abrams, one of our Director's Fellows and a film director for those of you who don't know, visited the Media Lab. I believe that thinking about the ethical aspects of these investments is essential. I specifically want to address the continuing investment in and ascension of the engineering and sciences in the world through ventures like MIT's new College of Computing, in terms of their influence and the scale at which they're being deployed. In the talks today, we've heard about some specific examples of how technology is being used to surveil the Uyghur community in China, but I thought I'd talk about it a little more generally.
One of the things to think about not just in this case, but also more broadly, is the role of technology in surveillance and human rights. I'm broadly interested in human rights, its relationship with technology and our role as Harvard and MIT and academia in general to intervene in these types of situations. I'm probably the least informed about this topic of everyone here, so first of all, I'm very grateful to all of the people who have been working on this topic and for helping me get more informed. You can view the video of the event here and read my edited remarks below.Įdited transcript.Hello, I'm Joi Ito, the Director of the MIT Media Lab. As a starting point, I think it is critically important to facilitate conversations about this problem through events like this one. Many of my activities these days are focused on the prevention of misuse of technology in the future, but it requires more than just bolting ethicists onto product teams - I think it involves a fundamental shift in our priorities and a redesign of the relationship of the humanities and social sciences with engineering and science in academia and society. The Uyghur human rights crisis demonstrates how the technology we build, even with the best of intentions, may be used to surveil and harm people. But as I dove into researching what is happening to the Uyghur community in China, I realized that it connected to a lot of the themes I have run up against in my own work, particularly the importance of considering the ethical and social implications of technology early on in the design and development process. When the student organizer of the conference, Zuly Mamat, asked me to speak at the event, I wasn't sure what I would say because I'm definitely not an expert on this topic.
#Mit media lab mind magic mischief full#
Our work is highly interdisciplinary and combines insights and methods from human computer interaction, sensor technologies, machine learning, brain computer interfaces, design and HCI, psychology, and neuroscience to create new opportunities for studying and intervening in human psychology in-the-wild.īelow you will find the 7 theme… View full descriptionīelow you will find the 7 themes that we work on.A few weeks ago I was asked to make some remarks at the MIT-Harvard Conference on the Uyghur Human Rights Crisis. The solutions we design are compact and wearable to support real-life studies and interventions. Our designs support cognitive skills by teaching users to exploit and develop the untapped powers of their mind or by seamlessly supplementing users' natural cognitive abilities. While today's pervasive digital devices put the world’s information at our fingertips, they do not help us with some of the cognitive skills that are arguably more important to leading a successful life, such as motivation, attention, memory, creativity, communication, empathy and emotion regulation. Building upon insights from Psychology and Neuroscience, the Fluid Interfaces group creates systems and experiences for cognitive enhancement.
0 kommentar(er)
