Post-Prediction Unconference!
We’re very excited to be co-orgainising the first “Post-Prediction” unconference next month, Feb 18th (a Tuesday).
The event was conceived while I was reading this book — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
Notably, in the book, Shoshana brings up the problem of how we, as a society, will deal with the (coming, but also already present) motivations of behavioural change that “ultimately-predictive” abilities will give us.
So, this unconference is centered around this idea, with a particular focus/interest on:
- Empathy and ethics, bias and fairness,
- Projects for social good,
- Creative applications,
- Inclusion and community-building,
- Teaching and education,
- Journalism and story-telling,
- Privacy and security,
- Sustainability,
- Data governance,
- Human-in-the-loop systems,
- The UI the experience of AI.
Now, the event is running in an unconference style, and that means it will be entirely driven by those present. The focus will all be on engaging with each other, on topics that we agree upon on the day.
We have three (pretty big) rooms to work with, so there will be plenty of space to work together.
Roughly, the way it will work is, we write up on the whiteboard things we want to talk about, then talk about that!
To make things concrete, here’s some things I’m thinking I’d like to see/discuss:
- Paper discussion: The Incentives that Shape Behaiour. This paper came out a few days ago; it seems very related to the idea of how to change AI systems so that they don’t try and influence people in the wrong ways. It at least gives a framework for the idea. Is the paper any good? At a glance, I found it slightly problematic, but I’m interested to discuss it with people!
- Tool discussion: Huggingface Transformers. Let’s try and use this library! I’ve been using it a bit for some projects; it seems neat. I’d like to get across it more, and use it to train some fun generative-text models.
- Book discussion: ??? I’d love to hear what other people have been reading, and what they’ve been making of what they read. Any good thoughts out there in this space that people should know about? Authors that people have missed?
- DeepOps: What kind of devops are people doing for their AI projects? How does it look? Are you having a good time? Why? Why not?
Overall, I’m really very interested to see what the group discusses. It will be really exciting to get together as a community and have a think about this issue!
Hope to see you there!
