Centre for Ethics

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Artificial Intelligence

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Computer Science

machine learning

Psychology

Research & Innovation

Researchers across disciplines gathered recently at the Absolutely Interdisciplinary conference to reckon with the ramifications of the evolving AI landscape – from the technology’s transformative impacts on work and education, to its implications for human cognition and values.

The third annual academic conference held by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) at the University of Toronto featured 23 speakers from diverse fields such as computer science, psychology, law, economics, education, philosophy, media studies, and literature.

“The recent impacts of generative AI tools have really emphasized how important it is to build spaces for interdisciplinary conversations,” said SRI Director and Chair Gillian Hadfield, the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, CIFAR AI Chair and professor in the Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management.

“Our goal with Absolutely Interdisciplinary is to foster new research agendas based in the creative interplay of diverse questions and framings as we explore the potentials of these new technologies.”

Cognition, storytelling and the future of intelligence

The conference featured an opening keynote by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice-president and fellow at Google Research, and a regular participant in developing cross-disciplinary dialogues about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy and risk.

“We’re all going through a bit of existential angst because most of us believe that we have been the smartest things on Earth for some time now,” he said. “I don’t think that will any longer be the case.”

In his keynote lecture, Blaise Agüera y Arcas of Google Research spoke about the history and potential future of AI development (supplied image)

Exploring the historical connections between neuroscience, computer science and cognitive science, Agüera y Arcas discussed the progress made in visual perception by neural networks in recent years, and delved into the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), including ongoing debates on whether AI might become sentient and pose a risk to humans.

“Some people take AGI to mean superintelligence, others take it to mean consciousness,” said Agüera y Arcas, who highlighted storytelling as an essential quality of human experience, and how the construction of personal narratives about ourselves and our past help to predict our future.

“We are the stories that we tell ourselves,” Agüera y Arca noted. “And as we interact with people, we construct and edit that story over time.”

AI, learning and the role of education

In a session pairing psychology with computational neuroscience, Joel Leibo of Google DeepMind and SRI Faculty Fellow William Cunningham, a professor in U of T’s department of psychology, presented their ongoing work on modeling human social interactions using artificial agents to test social cognitive theory.

Leibo and Cunningham showed that by simulating coordination games in multi-agent reinforcement learning, they could test the origins of very human things like in-group bias and coalition-building.

SRI Research Lead Ashton Anderson, assistant professor in the department of computer science, moderated another session on learning from a different perspective: the implications of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT for educators and students.

Panelist Lauren Bialystok, an associate professor of social justice education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and acting director of U of T’s Centre for Ethics, offered ideas on why we value the concept of “originality” and discipline students who violate it by using ChatGPT to write assignments.

“What is the benchmark against which cheating emerges as a moral wrong or a pedagogical error?” asked Bialystok.

“Is technology the enemy of originality? What about individual originality versus collective originality? We need to start sussing out what really matters to us in student learning and student assessment.”

From left to right: Moderator Nicolas Papernot with panelists William Cunningham and Joel Leibo, who described how multi-agent reinforcement learning can be used to test aspects of social cognitive theory (supplied image)

AI’s capabilities, behaviours and harms

One of the more frequent fears cited about AI is that it will replace workers – a subject tackled in a session moderated by SRI Research Lead Avi Goldfarb, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management. Economist Daniel Rock of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School shared his recent findings on which occupations are most likely to be impacted by large language models.

“People who process information [and] have knowledge as part of their work are more exposed,” said Rock, who noted that this exposure can be harmful or helpful.

“One of the key things for economists to add to this conversation is equilibrium,” Rock said. “It’s not just about AI replacing workers – there’s complementary innovation to be done here; there’s supply and demand; there’s the question of whether making one part of work cheap makes another part of it very expensive. There is a lot more work to be done here.”

New languages, new frameworks for understanding

The conference closed with a session on AI and creativity led by SRI Faculty Fellow Avery Slater, an assistant professor in the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science. The session featured presentations by literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles, whose work has focused on relations between science, literature and technology, and U.K.-based poet Polly Denny, who presented her experiments with text-generating AI systems that have yielded new forms of artistic collaboration.

Where Agüera y Arcas’s opening keynote highlighted the role of narration about the self as constitutive of what we might think of as AGI, Hayles also framed the question of whether AI is “alive” in similarly fundamental terms of how perception and meaning-making construct and define the environments in which we operate.

“Where there's life, there’s cognition. But computational media also have cognitive capabilities,” Hayles said.

Read the full story at the Schwartz Reisman Institute

Brave new tech: Experts say AI tools like ChatGPT – and the ethical questions they raise – are here to stay

siddiq22 — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 18:44:10 +0000

Brave new tech: Experts say AI tools like ChatGPT – and the ethical questions they raise – are here to stay

siddiq22 Wed, 04/05/2023 - 14:44

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(Clockwise from top left) Catherine Moore, Ashton Anderson, Karina Vold, Paul Bloom, Valérie Kindarji and Paolo Granata (supplied images, photo of Bloom by Greg Martin)

Chris Sasaki

Topic

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

School of Cities

Artificial Intelligence

This image was created by directing Dall-e to produce an image of the University of Toronto in the style of painter Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (Image by DALL-E/ directed by Chris Sasaki)

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rapidly advance, there has been a surge in the development of AI-powered content creation tools like ChatGPT and Dall-e that offer users a range of personalized experiences. However, with this growth come concerns about the potential dangers and ramifications of such apps, from privacy concerns to the displacement of human workers.

For example, the previous paragraph was written by ChatGPT, illustrating the blurring of lines between AI- and human-generated content. And the image at right was created by directing Dall-e to produce an image of “the University of Toronto in the style of van Gogh’s The Starry Night.”

In recent months, news headlines have outlined the issues relating to generative AI tools and content. Illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, musicians and writers have expressed concerns about losing income to generative AI and having their creations used as source material without permission or compensation.

On the academic front, instructors are having to cope with students submitting work written by ChatGPT and are re-evaluating how best to teach and assess courses as a result. Institutions such as U of T are examining the ramifications of this technology and providing guidelines for students and instructors.

Despite the challenges, many experts say that the technology is here to stay, and that our focus should be on establishing guidelines and safeguards for its use, while others look to its positive potential.

Faculty of Arts & Science writer Chris Sasaki spoke with six U of T experts about the impact of generative AI tools – and the ethical questions posed by the new technology.

Ashton Anderson

Assistant professor, department of computer science

We are increasingly seeing AI game-playing, text generation and artistic expression tools that are designed to simulate a specific person. For example, it is easy to imagine AI models that play in the style of chess champion Magnus Carlsen, write like a famous author, or interact with students like their favourite teacher’s assistant. My colleagues and I refer to these as mimetic models – they mimic specific individuals – and they raise important social and ethical issues across a variety of applications.

Will they be used to deceive others into thinking they are dealing with a real person – a business colleague, celebrity or political figure? What happens to an individual’s value or worth when a mimetic model performs well enough to replace that person? Conversely, what happens when the model exhibits bad behaviour – how does that affect the reputation of the person being modeled? And in all these scenarios, has consent been given by the person being modelled? It is vital to consider all of these questions as these tools increasingly become part of our everyday lives.

Paul Bloom

Professor, department of psychology

What ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are doing right now is very impressive and also very scary. There are many questions about their capabilities that we don’t know the answers to. We don’t know their limits – whether there will be some things that a text generator is fundamentally incapable of doing. They can write short pieces, or write in the style of a certain person, but could they write a longer book?

Some people don’t think they’ll be capable of a task like that, because these tools use deep-learning statistics – they produce sentences, then predict what comes next. But they lack the fundamentals of human thought. And until they possess those fundamentals, they’ll never come close to writing like we do. We have many things they don’t: we have a model of the world in our minds, mental representations of our homes, our friends. And we have memories. Machines don’t have those and until they do, they won’t be human – and they won’t be able to write, illustrate and create the way we do.

Paolo Granata

Associate professor, Media Ethics Lab; book and media studies, St. Michael’s College

AI literacy is key. Whether something is viewed as a threat or an opportunity, the wisest course of action is to comprehend it. For instance, since there are tasks that AI does more effectively than humans, let’s concentrate on tasks that humans do better than AI. The emergence of widely accessible generative AI technologies should also motivate educators to reconsider pedagogy, assignments and the whole learning process.

AI is an eye-opener. The function of educators in the age of AI has to be re-evaluated – educators should be experience-designers rather than content providers. In education, the context is more important than the content. Now that we have access to such powerful content producers, we can focus primarily on a proactive learning approach.

Valérie Kindarji

PhD candidate, department of political science

While public focus has been on the disruptive AI technologies themselves, we cannot forget about the people behind the screen using these tools. Our democracy requires informed citizens with access to high-quality information, and digital literacy is crucial for us to understand these technologies so we can best leverage them. It is empowering to have access to tools which can help spark our creativity and summarize information in a split second.

But while it is important to know what these tools can do to help us move forward, it is just as important to learn and recognize their limitations. In the age of information overload, digital literacy can provide us with pathways to exercise our critical thinking online, to understand the biases impacting the output of AI tools and to be discerning consumers of information. The meaning of literacy continues to evolve with technology, and we ought to encourage initiatives which help us learn how to navigate the online information ecosystem. Ultimately, we will be better citizens and neighbours for it.

Catherine Moore

Adjunct professor, School of Cities; Faculty of Music

Would seeing a credit at the end of a film, ‘Original score generated by Google Music,’ alter my appreciation of the score? I don't think so. Music in a film is meant to produce an emotional impact. That’s its purpose. And if a score created by AI was successful in doing that, then it’s done its job – regardless of how it was created.

What’s more, generative AI “composers” raise the questions: What is sound; what is music? What is natural sound; what is artificial sound? These questions go back decades, with people capturing mechanical sounds or sounds from nature. You speed them up, slow them down. You do all sorts of things to them. The whole electro-acoustic music movement was created by musicians using technology to manipulate acoustic sounds to create something new.

I see the advent of AI-generated music as part of a natural progression in the long line of music creators using new technologies with which to create and produce – in order to excite, intrigue, surprise, delight and mystify listeners the way they always have.

Karina Vold

Assistant professor, Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology; Centre for Ethics; Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society

The progress of these tools is exciting, but there are many risks. For example, there’s bias in these systems that reflects human bias. If you asked a tool like ChatGPT to name ten famous philosophers, it would respond with ten Western male philosophers. And when you then asked for female philosophers, it would still only name Western philosophers. So, GPT-4 is Open AI’s attempt to respond to these concerns, but unfortunately, they haven’t all been addressed.

In his book On Bullshit, [moral philosopher] Harry Frankfurt argues that "bullshitters" are more dangerous than liars, because liars at least keep track of their lies and remember what’s true and what’s a lie. But bullshitters just don't care. Well, ChatGPT is a bullshitter – it doesn’t care about the truth of its statements. It makes up content and it makes up references. And the problem is that it gets some things right some of the time, so users start to trust it – and that’s a major concern.

Lawmakers need to catch up in terms of regulating these generative AI companies. There’s been internal review by some companies, but that’s not enough. My view is there should be ethics review boards and even laws regulating this new technology.

Fresh takes: U of T alumna organizes undergraduate research conference at the Centre for Ethics

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 18:23:19 +0000

Fresh takes: U of T alumna organizes undergraduate research conference at the Centre for Ethics

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/15/2021 - 14:23

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Recent grad Amelia Eaton, who worked as a research assistant at the Centre for Ethics, says undergraduate students are questioning long-held assumptions about race, gender and the environment (photo courtesy of Amelia Eaton)

Cynthia Macdonald

Topic

Undergraduate Students

Woodsworth College

For 15 years, the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics has served as a nexus for research and discourse on the ethical aspects of virtually every subject imaginable – from artificial intelligence to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet, today’s scholars of ethics aren’t only looking at new problems. They’re also questioning the very foundations of what many think of as received wisdom.

“Working here has allowed me to appreciate how some ethical questions have always been present, but are now getting renewed attention,” says Amelia Eaton, a recent graduate from the Faculty of Arts & Science who spent the past summer as a research assistant at the centre. “People are exploring them in new ways.”

That’s especially true of today’s undergraduates, who are questioning long-held assumptions in areas such as race, gender and the environment. Eaton says that’s where she got the idea to organize the Centre for Ethics’s first-ever undergraduate research conference in July, titled “Ethics, Intersections, Reflections.”

Now entering her first year of law school at Dalhousie University, Eaton recently graduated from Woodsworth College with a major in ethics, society and law and minors in philosophy and political science. With a particular interest in prison research, a fascination with ethical questions prompted her to seek an appointment at the Centre for Ethics as a work-study student during the last two years of her degree.

There, she promoted and hosted events and worked on a number of important initiatives, including the Annotated Bibliography of Ethics of AI – part of the centre’s online companion to the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI – the centre’s array of podcasts and online journals, and its expansive collection of event videos available on its YouTube channel. She even started the Centre for Ethics’s TikTok account.

Markus Dubber (Photo by Chris Sorensen)

“During her time at the centre, Amelia made tremendous contributions to all aspects of the centre’s intellectual life,” says Markus Dubber, director of the Centre for Ethics. “She took full advantage of the opportunities and resources the centre has to offer, and even created new ones along the way.

“Working with other students and centre researchers, she became an integral part of the centre’s efforts to create a hub for interdisciplinary research across the university and to engage the public on a wide range of issues of ethical significance”.

Eaton’s work-study program complemented her ethics, society and law studies, where she was encouraged to train a fresh ethical eye on ideas old and new. She adds that the Trinity College program also equipped her with skills in argumentation and deductive reasoning that will serve her well in law school.

Digging deep into ethical questions, however, requires discussion. In her first years at U of T, Eaton says she could easily meet that requirement with friends in coffee shops or pubs.

But the move to a virtual format during the pandemic made things more challenging. While “everyone was still so passionate about what they were researching,”Eaton says, “the few people who used to stick around after the tutorial couldn’t continue chatting because everyone would just log out of Zoom and be done.”

The Ethics, Intersections and Reflections undergraduate conference helped fill the gap. Through targeted advertising and word of mouth, Eaton narrowed her conference applicants down to six presenters from a variety of diverse backgrounds with expertise in everything from computer science and anthropology to religion and urban planning.

“I didn’t want it to be 10 papers about Simone de Beauvoir or Plato,” she says. “I wanted presentations on topics that students discuss all the time – things are that are happening right now. We were also really clear in our call for submissions that they didn’t have to be philosophy students. We got a great response. There were so many submissions, it was hard to get through all of them.”

Presentations included recent graduate Jeffrey Ma’s exploration of Indian matchmaking, and alumna Bailey Irene Midori Hoy’s presentation on the relationship between intergenerational trauma and family heirlooms said to be “cursed.” Tsitsi Macherera and Maliha Sarwar discussed surveillance and vaccine hesitancy, respectively, while Alex Heyman and Ariel LaFayette cast an innovative lens on utilitarianism and religious experience.

What most gratified Eaton about the conference was the level of engagement it inspired.

“The presenters were not only interested in showing their own work, but in drawing connections between what they were doing and what others were doing,” she says. “I know that students were able to develop connections that I wasn’t necessarily expecting.”

Eaton says she looks forward to organizing more conferences as a law student, and hopes that her research initiative is carried on at the Centre for Ethics– a place that has been central to her evolution as a thinker.

“I can’t overstate the importance of having this centre at U of T,” she says. “It shows that we can all talk about ethics – that we all have not only the ability, but the obligation to ask normative questions about different institutions in our society. I used to think that artificial intelligence was a technology problem, that prisons were a sociology problem and that surveillance was a political science problem. But ethics is what brings these subjects together.

“It allows all disciplines to be in conversation with one another.”

The Ethics of Architecture: Mark Kingwell launches U of T-Oxford book series

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:09:40 +0000

The Ethics of Architecture: Mark Kingwell launches U of T-Oxford book series

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 04/28/2021 - 15:09

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(Photo by Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images)

Topic

Anti-Racism & Cultural Diversity Office

Global

Philosophy

Architecture is a part of daily life that often gets overlooked.

From a simple doorknob to spectacular feats of engineering, such as the 430-metre Zhangjiajie skywalk bridge in China’s Hunan Province, the built environment reflects and responds to societies’ values.

It also raises questions about aesthetics, technology – and ethics.

In The Ethics of Architecture, Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, looks at architecture’s ethical implications and whether building designers should serve the community as well as clients. That includes exploring “the professional obligations of architects,” considerations in the field about the common good and the notion of architecture as a collective undertaking.

The book, the first in a series published by University of Oxford Press in partnership with U of T’s Centre for Ethics, comes as the world grapples with a global health crisis. And, as Kingwell writes in the preface, world-historical shifts and disasters, especially those related to public health, have often shaped physical structures in cities and beyond.

“There is a long history of architectural innovation driven by human frailty,” Kingwell writes, citing sewage systems, indoor plumbing, heating and vertical density, among other examples.

Like others who have wondered whether the pandemic recovery will usher in positive changes, Kingwell also asks what “utopian opportunities” for architecture lie ahead to create more equitable societies.

Called “Ethics in Context,” the book series pledges to explore “the ethical dimensions of interesting, provocative, and timely questions” in a way that is both scholarly and accessible.

It is the brainchild of Markus Dubber, a professor of law and criminology in the Faculty of Law and the director of U of T’s Centre for Ethics.

He says the series – like the centre itself – aims to position itself itself at the intersection of academic research and public discourse.

“The inclusive, interdisciplinary vision of ethical inquiry that characterizes the Centre for Ethics lent itself to the establishment of this series,” Dubber says.

The second instalment in the series will look at the ethics of racial humour, and is written by Luvell Anderson, an associate professor of philosophy at Syracuse University who specializes in the philosophy of language, race and aesthetics.

As for Kingwell, he uses The Ethics of Architecture to address serious scholars of ethics as well as general readers with an interest in the built environment and how cities work – or don’t.

His observations are timely given that more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, with the number expected to grow to 68 per cent by 2050.

Since Kingwell’s book was first in the series, he says it can be seen as a “sort of keynote” that is intended for specialist readers and a lay audience alike.

“It feels more like an advanced seminar with smart people from various disciplines, plus some auditors,” Kingwell says.

“You can’t take anything for granted, so no exclusionary jargon or inside terminology is allowed,” he says. “But the material has to be meaty enough to reward serious interest.”

From hack-a-thons to Wakanda, U of T celebrates Black History Month with virtual events

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 21:38:38 +0000

From hack-a-thons to Wakanda, U of T celebrates Black History Month with virtual events

geoff.vendeville Fri, 01/29/2021 - 16:38

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Drummer Suzette Vidale performs during last year's Black History Month Luncheon – one of many Black History Month events at U of T that will be held virtually this year (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Yanan Wang

Topic

City & Culture

Black History Month

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Hart House

Women and Gender Studies

The pandemic halted in-person events of all kinds, but it isn’t stopping the University of Toronto community from celebrating Black History Month.

February is packed with online events, ranging from a discussion of Afrofuturism and the world-building of Wakanda to U of T’s marquee Black History Month Luncheon, which is celebrating its 19th year.

Here's a snapshot of what’s taking place virtually across U of T’s three campuses this month.

Jan. 29

Let’s Talk Careers in Law

Arleen Huggins, partner and head of the employment law group at Koskie Minsky LLP, Danardo Jones, an assistant professor of law at the University of Windsor, and Sue-Lynn Noel, vice-president, general counsel and corporate secretary at Purolator, discuss their personal experiences and triumphs in the law profession, with details on how they found community, mentorship and belonging despite anti-Black racism and discrimination. Presented by Hart House and access and inclusion peer programs. 2 - 3 p.m.

Feb. 1

Black history Wikipedia edit-a-thon kick-off event

U of T Libraries is planning a month-long series of events intended to improve the quality of Black history pages on Wikipedia. To kick things off, they are hosting a roundtable with U of T Scarborough’s writer-in-residence El Jones about ameliorating the historical record through public history initiatives and shared open knowledge. 12:30 - 2 p.m.

Feb. 2

Feeling Like an Imposter and Racial Gaslighting

Mairi McKenna Edwards, co-ordinator of equity, diversity and inclusion training at Student Life, and Jasjit Sangha, a learning strategist, lead a session on feelings of self-doubt, or “imposter phenomena,” which are common among those under-represented in academia. The event is open only to U of T employees who identify as Black, Indigenous or people of colour. 12 p.m.

Feb 2.

She’s Malcolm X!

Part of Hart House’s Black Futures series, this dialogue focuses on Black Muslim women’s historical influence and contribution to social change. The event features speaker, scholar and educator Mustafa Briggs, Rania El Mugammar, an artist, anti-oppression consultant and liberation educator, and Ikran Jama, a Rhodes Scholar and president of U of T’s Arts & Science Students Union. Habon Ali, a graduate student at McMaster University and former U of T Mississauga valedictorian, will be moderating. 4 - 6 p.m.

Feb 3.

The Coromantee War: Charting the Course of an Atlantic Slave Revolt

In the inaugural Decanal Lecture, Harvard historian Vincent Brown discusses the Jamaican Coromantee War of 1760-171. Brown, a professor of American history and African and African-American studies, is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts & Science. 7 - 8:30 p.m.

Feb. 5

The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada[s] (Race, Ethics + Power: Emerging Scholars)

Ola Mohammed, an assistant professor of Black popular culture at York University, discusses her current project, “The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s),” in which she looks at the sonic dimension of Black social life and anti-Blackness in Canada. Presented by U of T’s Centre for Ethics and streamed on YouTube. 4 p.m.

Feb. 6 and 7

NSBE Hacks

The National Society of Black Engineers, which opened a chapter at U of T in 1999, hosts its 24-hour student hackathon.

Feb. 8

Black History Symposium: Honouring the Diversity of Black Leaders and Agents of Change

The 2021 Black History Symposium will explore anti-Black racism activism in diverse spaces and the role of post-secondary environments in transforming anti-Black racism advocacy. Dahabo Ahmed Omer, executive director of the Black North Initiative, is the event’s keynote speaker. The symposium also includes remarks by Njoki Wane, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and Dexter Voisin, dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, both of whom are members of the university's anti-Black racism task force. There is also a panel discussion titled, “Pathways and Initiatives – Reinventing Anti-Black Racism Activism.” Hosted by U of T’s Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office. 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Feb 11.

Black Athletes on the Margins: I am More!

Black professional athletes of different sport backgrounds discuss their experience finding acceptance and success, as well as new challenges brought on by COVID-19. The webinar also features spoken-word artists and a live raffle with prizes from Black-owned businesses. Presented by U of T Mississauga’s: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office; International Education Centre and department of recreation, athletics and wellness. 12 - 1:30 p.m.

Feb. 11

The Worldbuilding of Wakanda: Black Panther and Afrofuturism

Join action-adventure fantasy writer Antoine Bandele, futurist writer Stephanie Chrismon and editor-in-chief of Pressed Magazine Rashid Mohiddin for a talk on how elements of science fiction and fantasy intersect with African representation and the ways in which Black Panther presents its progress themes through its unique setting. Presented by Hart House as part of the Black Futures series 6 - 8 p.m.

Feb. 12

Ninth Floor film screening

More than 50 years later, filmmaker Mina Shum looks at a landmark student uprising in Canadian history: the 14-day sit-in at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (now part of Concordia). More than 200 students peacefully occupied the ninth floor of a campus building to protest the university’s handling of a racism complaint by a group of Black students. The screening of the documentary, presented by the Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office, will be followed by a question-and-answer session. 12 - 2 p.m.

Feb. 24

A Portal to Change: Connections & Conversations Celebrates Black History Month

How can Black staff harness the current momentum for change to build an architecture of inclusion at the university, while realizing their own aspirations? Dexter Voisin, dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and co-chair of the university's anti-Black racism task force, and Amorell Saunders N'Daw, co-founder of Connections & Conversations and partner, equity, diversity and inclusion lead at KBRS, discuss navigating systemic racism and share insights. 12 - 1 p.m.

Feb. 24

Exploring Black & Indigenous Futurisms 2021

Black and Indigenous writers and artists lead a discussion about grappling with their place, culture and identity now and in the future. The event features Genie-winning filmmaker Lisa Jackson, photographic artist Adeyemi Adegbesan, and futurist writer Stephanie Chrismon. The talk, organized by Hart House, will be moderated by Audrey Hudson, chief of education and programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Karyn Recollet, an associate professor at U of T’s Women and Gender Studies Institute. 4 - 6 p.m.

Feb. 26

Black History Month Luncheon

U of T’s Black History Month Luncheon, celebrating its 19th year, goes online for the first time, featuring special guests from different walks of life who will talk about their careers as well as Black history and culture. This year, the luncheon will be raising funds to support Black students and scholarship. Check back here to see the guest line-up after it is announced. 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.

U of T Centre for Ethics explores relationship between race, ethics and power

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:56:08 +0000

U of T Centre for Ethics explores relationship between race, ethics and power

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 01/21/2021 - 08:56

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Protesters march during a rally in Toronto after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis (photo by Arindam Shivaani/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Arts & Science news staff

Topic

Graduate Students

Undergraduate Students

Woodsworth College

The University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics has launched a project that explores the complex themes of race, ethics and power through emerging scholars and interdisciplinary perspectives.

The Race, Ethics and Power (REP) project, which rolled out last fall in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, includes an emerging scholars series, undergraduate and graduate student reading and working groups, as well as public facing events.

The centre also brought on two research associates, as well as six undergraduate and graduate researchers, to help run the project.

Vasuki Shanmuganathan and Christopher Smith – the two research associates – are both PhDs with backgrounds in race, colonialism and health, as well as Black diaspora cultural studies, Black expressive cultures and practices, and queer and feminist theory, respectively.

“Seeing this project connect and engage with ongoing and current race matters as part of the greater community is different in design and approach,” said Shanmuganathan. “Being so close to the heartbeat of ongoing issues on the ground and providing a platform for discussions makes the centre a remarkable space to work, learn and be in.”

Alongside the centre’s Critical Race Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives series, which features interdisciplinary talks from established scholars in the field, the emerging scholars series brings together Canadian and international emerging scholars – graduate and doctoral students – whose work is at the cutting edge of race, ethics and power research to examine underrepresented histories and provide fresh perspectives.

“We want to challenge who we perceive as doing scholarly work and include presenters who combine academic and creative approaches converging on themes of race, ethics and power,” said Shanmuganathan.

To date, presentations have explored topics from Black LGBTQ+ identity politics in Brazil to “surface, abstraction and skin” in Black contemporary art.

Flash events have included a conversation with Jonathan Kidd and Sonya Winton-Odamtten, co-executive producers of the HBO television series Lovecraft Country.

“The speakers chosen for this series illustrate that concerns regarding race, ethics and power extend beyond theoretical debates normally assumed to happen in the university classroom,” said Smith.

“These conversations are already occurring on the ground and in all institutions.”

Markus Dubber, the centre’s director, says his goal for Race, Ethics and Power was to provide others with a space to build a project of their own.

“It wasn’t just that I wanted to focus on the subject matter,” he said.

Beyond the emerging scholars series, Shanmuganathan and Smith also run a Race, Ethics and Power reading group and working group for undergraduate and graduate researchers at the centre.

The reading group, which includes students from a range of disciplines, discusses publications related to race, ethics and power with the hope that students will learn how to pose strong research questions and consider how to apply what they learn to their own writing and life.

“The purpose of the group is to foster a critical conversation across disciplines by engaging the work of each speaker,” said Smith. “Each of the fellows is at a different stage academically, so a key function of the group is to enable each other to work through complex ideas and arguments by each author.”

Tsitsi Macherera, a fourth-year Woodsworth College pursuing a double major in ethics, society and law and book and media studies, is an undergraduate researcher at the Centre for Ethics.

She says the project has given her a greater awareness of the ethical impasses and questions present in other scholarly disciplines and a greater appreciation of interdisciplinary scholarship.

“I’ve been really energized by the discussions, especially the opportunity they present for engaging with people from different areas of the university,” said Macherera. “My time in the group has made me better appreciate the communal aspects of learning.

“I think the centre was purposive in making room for emerging scholars who are touching on a lot of age-old issues in fresh ways. It's always energizing to see scholars expanding the boundaries of their disciplines to include necessary conversations about race.”

The working group acts as a research hub that Shanmuganathan says provides student researchers with “a space to discuss research, benefit from mentoring and better navigate their learning process.”

Farhia Farah – an Race, Ethics and Power graduate student researcher and second-year master’s student in the department for the study of religion – focuses her research on Islam and gender from a sociology of religion perspective and explores the themes of ethics, race and power. She says she was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the project.

“I appreciate how the centre is big on collaboration and innovation, and in facilitating cross-disciplinary conversations between fellows who are from a variety of backgrounds. It allows us space to grow and engage with questions and ideas we may not necessarily have the space, time or funding for in other departments,” Farah said.

For Shanmuganathan and Smith the goal is to give students an opportunity to talk about race, ethics and power and participate in these discussions regardless of discipline.

“We hope that both the reading and working groups allow students to feel they are being supported in their work and are able to connect with others in REP. This is especially important during these uncertain times when we are only able to meet online,” said Shanmuganathan. “Community is centred in the REP project.”

Six lessons U of T experts hope we learn from the pandemic

lanthierj — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 14:41:16 +0000

Six lessons U of T experts hope we learn from the pandemic

lanthierj Tue, 08/11/2020 - 10:41

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(photo by Richard Lautens/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Chris Sasaki

Topic

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

School of Cities

Department of Earth Sciences

Citizen Lab

Earth Sciences

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Faculty of Medicine

Geography and Planning

Global

Political Science

Sociology

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. However, it’s been with us long enough to clearly expose fault lines, inequities and deficiencies in virtually every sector of society. As a result, many have concluded there is a need for a “new normal” rather than a return to the status quo.

But what should that new normal look like? What lessons have we learned – or should we have learned – from the pandemic?

Writer Chris Sasaki, of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, recently put those questions to a range of experts at the university.

Sylvia Bashevkin, professor in the department of political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science

In mid-March, I wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star about the challenges facing social cohesion in Canada. Four months later, our circumstances seem promising and, at the same time, threatening.

People have come together in remarkable ways to help each other. Some public officials have demonstrated insightful, principled leadership. Yet, inequalities along the lines of gender, race, Indigeneity and social class continue to drive citizens apart, making us distrust the core institutions that need to operate effectively at times of crises. We see protesters gather to deny the concept of a public good. They oppose mandatory mask rules and defend supposedly inalienable rights to haircuts and shopping.

These elements reflect profound tensions that threaten the foundations of liberal democracy in Canada. We must remember that collective thinking and action are crucial to protecting human health and the concept of a public good.

Sunit Das, associate professor in the department of surgery in the Faculty of Medicine, faculty associate at the Centre for Ethics

This moment – of the COVID-19 pandemic, of the #MeToo movement, of Black Lives Matter – has required all of us to consider what we as a society mean by fairness and equity, to consider the possibility that our society is fundamentally built on a foundation that capriciously compromises both for many of its constituents.

In medicine, fairness and equity are comprised by the principle of justice. Unique among the four pillars of medical ethics – along with beneficence, non-malfeasance and autonomy – justice looks beyond the individual patient before us and requires us to consider our duty as physicians as a duty to society.

The disproportionate cost of COVID-19 to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, elderly and disabled patients is a matter of justice. It is our duty as physicians to address the forces that allowed and continue to foster the unfairness and inequity made manifest by the pandemic in society and medicine.

As physicians, we have often proved ourselves to be upright stewards of beneficence, non-malfeasance and autonomy. We must remember that we are as bound by our duty as stewards of justice.

Miriam Diamond, professor in the department of Earth sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Science

Returning to pre-pandemic conditions – without learning from it – will condemn us and future generations to conditions beyond those we now face due to climate change, including uncertain and precarious health, social inequities and insecurity.

Like the pandemic, climate change is estimated to cause deaths, illness and displacement, accompanied by a very large economic price tag for both Canadians and 99 per cent of global citizens.

The good news is that we as a society can adapt our behaviour and practices according to advice given by experts, as we have done during the pandemic. To do this, we need to acknowledge the dire threat posed by climate change and plow government and private sector funding into decarbonized technologies that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase our global competitive advantage.

We need to exploit the lessons learned from COVID-19 to create a sustainable and equitable new normal for all Canadians and be a beacon to the international community.

Ito Peng, professor in the department of sociology in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

The most important lessons we’ve learned from the pandemic are the importance of having a good long-term care (LTC) system, the value of care and the consequences of the precarious status of care workers.

Canada’s LTC homes have done a spectacularly bad job in caring for our older citizens. We top the chart in COVID-related deaths in LTC homes, accounting for over 80 per cent of total deaths compared to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country average of 42 per cent.

Years of neglect and chronic underfunding have resulted in inadequate and low-quality services for the residents and terrible working conditions for care workers. The shift towards a private, for-profit-dominated LTC market have been incentivized by bad policies and weak regulations and created low-wage and poor working conditions for care workers.

After COVID-19, we must build a better regulated universal public LTC system that will provide better quality care and better training and pay for care workers.

Irene Poetranto, senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Although the coronavirus does not discriminate, its consequences do. Marginalized groups that are vulnerable to prejudice have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19.

Singapore and Thailand saw a jump in COVID-19 cases among low-wage migrant workers. Online attacks and offline harassment against LGBTQ2S+ persons increased following coronavirus infections from Seoul’s Itaewon district, a popular spot for LGBTQ2S+ people in South Korea. Remote mining sites in Indonesia and the Philippines have become COVID-19 transmission vectors, endangering local communities and Indigenous Peoples.

In responding to COVID-19, governments have relied on the military and police to enforce physical distancing and used surveillance mechanisms and pervasive data collection for contact tracing – all of which heighten the risk of human rights violations.

As the pandemic continues to turn public health into a security issue, we must ensure that the post-COVID-19 new normal is not one where a crisis of human rights and rule of law is normalized.

Matti Siemiatycki, associate professor in the department of geography and planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science, interim director of the School of Cities

The pandemic has disproportionally affected lower income, racialized and crowded communities – for example, in the inner suburbs in the northern part of the GTA. It has revealed more clearly our affordable housing crisis, as well as the damaging impacts of precarious employment. We’ve seen transit routes in the inner suburbs that are overcrowded despite the fact transit ridership declined drastically during the pandemic.

The pandemic has revealed – and in some cases accelerated – the shortcomings and cracks in society in terms of inequality of opportunity, public services and infrastructure that existed before.

So, we really need to respond to those challenges and change how we’re doing things. The new normal has to be different. We need to build back better, do things differently, respond to the health challenges that have arisen from the pandemic. The housing crisis must be addressed and conditions improved for low wage workers. And we need to do things like improve bus service in the inner suburbs, invest in dedicated bike lanes and make the city more walkable and not so dominated by cars.

In short, we need to rebuild a society that's more equitable, sustainable and just.

U of T's Centre for Ethics launches Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 20:03:24 +0000

U of T's Centre for Ethics launches Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 07/22/2020 - 16:03

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Markus Dubber, the director of U of T's Centre for Ethics, co-edited the nearly 900-page handbook, which examines the evolving field of AI through an interdisciplinary and international lens (photo courtesy Faculty of Law)

Alexa Zulak

Topic

Global Lens

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Medicine

Global

From smart cities and autonomous vehicles to facial recognition software and digital assistants standing by to answer questions, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming an important part of everyday life – and it’s only the beginning.

But the AI revolution also brings with it important ethical questions about the technology’s impact on people and society – questions that Markus Dubber, director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics, is delving into with the release of the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, a first of its kind globally.

Launched earlier this month, the nearly 900-page handbook examines the ever-evolving field of AI through an interdisciplinary and international lens, exploring 44 topics, including fairness and bias, race and gender, AI and consent, the ethics of automating design and more.

“I like these Oxford handbooks because of the opportunity to define the canon of the field and also shape it,” says Dubber, a professor in the Faculty of Law and co-editor of the handbook. “We can include approaches, perspectives and feature scholars who perhaps hadn't been thought of as central to the scholarly enterprise.”

Building on the centre’s “Ethics of AI in Context” initiative – an interdisciplinary workshop series launched in 2017 – Dubber worked with co-editors Sunit Das, an associate professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine, and Frank Pasquale of the University of Maryland, to create a handbook that was interdisciplinary. They wanted to broaden the conversation around the ethics of AI to include perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, law, medicine and engineering.

Read a Q&A with Markus Dubber about the handbook project

“AI now touches every aspect of everything we do individually, politically, communally, socially. So, all disciplines should be part of this conversation,” Dubber says.

“It's exciting to see the range of people participating: engineers, philosophers, political scientists, lawyers and cognitive scientists. Some didn't necessarily think of themselves as being part of this discipline at the beginning, but now they do.”

And while Dubber is no stranger to Oxford Press handbooks – he has co-edited several law handbooks – the ethics of AI did come with its own unique challenges.

“There’s no handbook for the handbook,” he says.

“The discipline is so fast moving – not just the tech but also the ethics. Anytime there's a new tech development, there will be some new ethical issue. So, it's not just that the technology keeps evolving, the ethics – the reflection on the normative dimensions of the technology – will change, too.”

But Dubber says the Centre for Ethics, an interdisciplinary unit from the onset, was the perfect place to take on this challenge – and it allowed him to involve his students from the centre in the project.

Graduate and undergraduate students in the centre’s cross-divisional Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Context course, along with research assistants and student affiliates of the centre’s Ethics of AI Lab, collaborated in pulling together an annotated bibliography to act as an open-access online companion to the handbook.

“It was fun to see the students take charge and produce something of first-rate quality that, as far as I know, is the only one of its kind anywhere,” Dubber says. “This is a comprehensive annotated bibliography of more than 800 sources covering 44 different subjects in the ethics of AI, ranging from smart cities to the singularity to European AI policy.”

What does Dubber want readers take away from the handbook? He hopes people to realize they don’t have to be experts in AI to think critically about the ethical issues surrounding the field.

“Instead of being overwhelmed by this accumulation of expertise across the world and across disciplines, they can see these are all important approaches and perspectives,” he says. “Ultimately, it's up to each one of us to decide what role AI – or technology generally – should play.”

For Dubber, ethics is a great equalizer.

“You don't need a degree in ethics to have an ethical view of anything,” he says. “You don't need a degree to have a sense of what's right and wrong and to think things through.”

U of T's Centre for Ethics explores ethical questions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 25 May 2020 15:58:02 +0000

U of T's Centre for Ethics explores ethical questions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 05/25/2020 - 11:58

Cutline

Markus Dubber, director of U of T's Centre for Ethics, says U of T is uniquely situated to tackle the ethical dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis because it's a "global research university with unusual excellence across the board" (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Topic