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Beyond Buzzwords - Reimagining Responsibility in Digital Societies

Prof Ruha Benjamin

On 24 October 2024 the RDS were honored to host Prof. Ruha Benjamin for a talk on reimagining responsibility in digital societies.

In an animated and impassioned talk, Prof. Ruha Benjamin of Princeton University, USA, got the audience thinking about the historical and sociological reasons why digital tools have built-in biases. She also discussed how these can perpetuate harmful racist, sexist, and classist tropes while also providing convenient excuses not to deal with the underlying systemic issues. Technology promises a utopian vision of personal freedoms, liberation from menial and repetitive tasks, but this vision doesn't reflect the dystopian exploitation that underpins the "freedoms" sold to users. These include data and supply chain workers, environmental resources, and weaknesses in the social contract, to name a few.

Prof. Benjamin provided us with a few key take-home messages to help build the us-topias we would like to see: The need to build consentful tech; Look at the underlying issue, rather than trying to fix the problem; Artificial intelligence developed or used without emotional intelligence is inherently flawed and dangerous; "Not all speed is movement"; A final reminder that no one is "just" anything, everyone's opinion and perspective is valid and we all share a responsibility in questioning the systems and structures we exist within.

 

Ruha Benjamin is Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024). Ruha earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology & Society Program.  She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, and President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. In 2024, Ruha was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. For more info, visit ruhabenjamin.com