The University Of Utah: Tanner Lecture On Artificial Intelligence And Human Values

Press release from The University of Utah:

Katie Piula

October 13, 2021

Obert C. Tanner Lecture on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values

“Shoshana Zuboff’s scholarship is an important call to action that makes clear the consequences of an uncritical approach to information technology development for human relationships, human rights and the human experience,” said Erika George, director of the Tanner Humanities Center. “Her career is a testament to the power of sustained research and careful observation to illuminate the big picture issues shaping our society.”

Zuboff is the author of three books, each of which signaled the start of a new epoch in technological society. In the late 1980s she foresaw how computers would revolutionize the modern workplace. Writing before the invention of the iPod or Uber, she predicted the rise of digitally mediated products and services tailored to the individual. She also warned of the individual and societal risks.

Now her masterwork, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” synthesizes years of research to reveal a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead, she argues they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order – a surveillance economy. She invites alternative approaches.

This event is sponsored by O.C Tanner and the University of Utah College of Humanities.

This press release was produced by The University of Utah. The views expressed here are the author’s own.