Berkeley ICSI / Hong Kong UST / The Future Society
AI Pioneer/Professor/Ethicist
San Juan, PR, USA / San Franciso, CA, USA / Sai Kung, NT, Hong Kong
USA
AI professor honored as Founding ACL Fellow for pioneering contributions to Google Translate. Independent director, AI ethics think tank The Future Society. Inaugural member, Google AI ethics council. Focus: language, bias, polarization and AI. Author, "Raising AI", coming Spring '25 from MIT Press.
Offer
Humanity already has the resources, talent, and technology to solve all our challenges across the SDGs. What we lack is the social will. Unfortunately, much of the same AI tech for good that folks like me helped pioneer is instead being deployed in social media, recommendation, search, chatbot, and newsfeed algorithms in "post-truth" ways that amplify and harden unconscious biases, misunderstandings, fearmongering, hatred, polarization, politicization, demonization, and dehumanization. My theory of change is that we can only move the politicians and executives by first moving the public, as I did in our wildly successful media campaign for Covid universal masking. I am using the voice I'm privileged to have as an AI pioneer to shine bright light upon the existentially dangerous unconscious ways that AIs are sapping our social will on all the SDGs, and to built a movement to demand that AI algorithms stop dragging us into a new AI Dark Ages and instead to become the catalyst for a new AI Age of Englightment.
NEED
Honestly: funding. I'm the last of my peer level to have consistently declined all the lucrative opportunities from big tech, because I know they would silence me on these challenges as they have my colleagues there. The amounts needed are small by Silicon Valley standards, but my academic income alone is not enough to self-finance the scale of media communications and R&D required to overcome heavy systemic resistance.
Call-to-Action
(1) Identify a small group of charter patrons as donors. (2) Network of communications, media, and filmmaking partners. (3) Allies on new enabling tech and data sources.