CCI-DSA Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr.David Widder
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
12:00 PM-1:00 PM
Title: AI Supply Chains: Glued to Big Tech, Disavowing War
Abstract: Contemporary AI systems are built by composing many pre-existing software modules that pass through many hands before becoming a finished product or service. In interviews with 27 artificial intelligence engineers across industry, open source, and academia, I found how engineers rarely see responsible AI to be within their power or responsibility to address. In this talk, I will present how fractured and distributed AI supply chains shift responsibility for AI harms to be always elsewhere, and thus nowhere. I will then present more recent work examining stops along this supply chain: how the United States Department of Defense funds research into (anything but) "Basic" AI research, and on the incentives that leave academic AI researchers to merely play Big Techs' game.
ReferencesSupply chain paper
About the Speaker: David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the
School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His recent research has been published in
FAccT,
CHI,
CSCW, and
Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Axios, the Associated Press, Wired, and Fortune. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore.