The Tech & Society Reading Group: September 2024 Edition

Every day, the world seems to change thanks to some new, technological advancement. These innovations, like any other tool, grant those of us with access to them a chance to use this technology within and upon the world. Some innovations grant us better insight by giving us access to knowledge. Others allow us to keep in touch with loved ones and meet new people. Others yet grant us the power to directly transform our world into a shape more to our liking. But, just as these tools allow us to act upon the world, these tools also act upon us. They have the power to dramatically change how we view and interact with others and even ourselves.

Just as the axe gives the woodcutter calluses with use, our modern tools act upon us.[1] We are learning too late just how drastically the smartphone (for all its wondrous benefits) has changed our attention spans. It has changed our dispositions concerning our expectations of others' availability to us at all hours of the day. It has fueled an entitlement to information that has dwarfed the same phenomenon experienced during the creation of the World Wide Web.

With so many rapid technological changes happening, it is critical that we gain mutual understanding as we determine how society should proceed. Everyone is a stakeholder in our communities, so gathering many perspectives is imperative. Seattle University hosts different fields of study from the arts, the humanities, the sciences, engineering, legal studies, business, and nursing. The faculty, staff, administrators, and students from all these fields come with unique perspectives on technology and its interaction with society. We have scholars investigating this relationship from the perspectives of their individual fields of study deep in the heart of one of the world's most tech-centric cities.

This past spring, Sarah Watstein (dean of the Lemieux Library), Steve Tapia (School of Law), and I (Computer Science) decided, with so much going on around campus, we needed a place to discuss tech and society. Beginning this summer, Seattle University has been hosting a reading group on campus discussing the relationship between rapid technological change and society. Every month, we read a new perspective and talk about how we can either incorporate this perspective into our teaching or discuss our fundamental disagreements with it.

Artificial intelligence has been on everyone's minds, so our first meetings were all about AI! We began on an optimistic note about innovation and its relationship to positive societal change, and we discussed how generative AI can be used not as a replacement but as a collaborative partner in the process of creation. Our next meeting involved dissecting Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence index report for 2024. These first two meetings set the groundwork for a mutual understanding of AI across the disciplines represented at SU, but it was our third meeting which really got the ball moving forward.

In August, we had the opportunity to discuss our thoughts on AI with Paolo Benanti. Paolo is a Franciscan monk with an impressive resume when it comes to the ethics of artificial intelligence. He acts as a consultant to the Pope on AI issues, works with the United Nations on ethical AI, and has also consulted with the Italian government as well. As if all that was not enough, Paolo is an educator at the Pontifical Gregorian University. We plumbed the depths of Paolo's expertise during our discussion which focused on the relationship between technological changes and human dignity. We were left invigorated in our quest to figure out how to incorporate technology (like AI) into our teaching and at the same time use technology to continue inspiring our students to be agents for change in their (and our) communities.

A consistent topic of discussion at each meeting is defining AI. Technologies we see as quite pedestrian today, like autocorrect and home assistants, were once cutting-edge AI solutions. Every new smartphone comes with a suite of AI tools embedded into it, but nobody really calls these AI anymore. Through our discussions, we have only begun to figure out what AI means today. It is certainly a moving target. Much of our fourth discussion, this month, focused on looking for the edges of the AI space as it stands today. If we want to understand how AI affects society, we need to first understand AI. It is the latest in our millennia-long history of tools which affect change in our world but also affect us.

Our reading group of faculty, staff, and administrative members at Seattle University look forward to tackling global concerns and translating them into positive impacts on our campus and local communities.

[1] This is a topic of significant interest to one of Seattle University's philosophers, Eric Severson. All credit for this analogy goes to him.