The slower weeks in the summer period have left some of us with extra time for reading! If you happen to be in search for some titles, here are some recommendations from our lab members:
- If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why superhuman AI would kill us all by Eliezer Yudkowski and Nate Soares
“How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive.” Read more.
- Media War: Dark Tech and Populists are Seizing Power by Martin Andree
“We see it every single day — the increasingly bitter and more strident battle for power and supremacy on the digital media scene. But who’s actually fighting against whom? Internationally renowned media expert Martin Andree shows how a coalition of Dark Tech, Trump and right-wing populists is openly making a power grab in a bid for autocracy.” Read more.
And, the PhD theses of the two latest graduates from our Lab:
- Building normative diversity into algorithmic news recommendations by Sanne Vrijenhoek
News recommender systems aim to predict which news items their users would like to read based on their past reading behavior. However, rather than only catering to a readers’ preferences, a diverse recommender system could also be used to expand a reader’s world view, to help them be more informed, or to expose them to events and ideas they were not aware of before. This dissertation therefore aims to answer the question: “How can we evaluate news recommender systems on their normative diversity?”. Read more.
- Epistemic interventions: An ethnographic enquiry into AI knowledge practices in the media sector by Anna Schjøtt Hansen
Over the last decade, the rapid incursion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into society has induced what scholars call an “epistemic shock”, leaving industries, citizens, and researchers alike to grapple with its constantly evolving potentials, challenges, and implications. This dissertation takes its starting point from a dual interest in this shock effect caused by AI, by, on the one hand, aiming to empirically explore new forms of domain-specific knowledge practices emerging in response to AI, while on the other, taking a more conceptual interest in how we can critically study AI’s entry into society. Read more.
Happy reading!
