AI-Propaganda And The New Politics of Tech

While everyone was talking about 'Fake News', 2016 was being shaped by a more powerful, and potentially dangerous development -- an automated political engagement machine. Using a combination of ad-targeting, behavior tracking, natural language processing, and adaptive engagement scripts, Trump and his allies ushered in a new era in global politics.

From the bots of Brexit to massive digital Russian armies, we’ll talk about how AI propaganda disrupted the 2016 election, then host a discussion about how designers, engineers, activists and policymakers can respond to this new reality.

Finally, we’ll imagine and scenario plan what kind of near future AI-propaganda may create -- like what if public opinion turns into a new form of high-frequency trading?

bio:

Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath are the founders of Scout, which explores the social implications of technology by combining reporting and near-term science fiction.  

Before founding Scout, Berit was the managing editor at Crosscut.com, a civic news site in Seattle, where she reinvented community journalism to help solve local problems and staged scenario planning games to help the city plan for cyber attacks and deal with climate refugees. She has worked closely with Strategic News Service, a predictive newsletter read by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Michael Dell, as well as the SNS FiRe conference, which brings together C-level technology executives, world-class scientists, and Oscar-winning documentary filmmakers to discuss how science and technology are reshaping our world.

Brett has worked in the realms of technology policy, interaction design, climate risk, artificial intelligence, and disaster response. In 2007 Brett designed and launched the first online voter registration system in the US and rallied a 1.8 million person community for T. Boone Picken’s renewable energy campaign in 4 months.

He's also worked with the International Centre for Earth Simulation based in Geneva, Switzerland, evaluating pilot projects that deploy supercomputing to conduct climate risk modeling.

Talk organized by ITP student, Ruta Kruliauskaite