AI and the Human Condition: Thinking Beyond Accuracy

Event Type

Seminar/Symposium

Sponsor

Humanities Research Institute

Location

Levis Faculty Center, Room 422 or Livestream

Date

Feb 12, 2025   4:00 pm  

Speaker

Iris Clever (History, University of Chicago), Respondent: Cris Hughes (Anthropology)

Contact

Humanities Research Institute

E-Mail

info-hri@illinois.edu

Views

61

Originating Calendar

HRI

Part of the “Think Again...” Event Series. This talk will be offered in person at Levis Faculty Center and as a livestream (watch this space for the link).

“Accuracy” is often associated with the number of correct predictions generated by a machine-learning model and can be taken as a metric of performance of an AI system. Although its usefulness as such a metric is debatable, the notion of accuracy itself still organizes much of the thinking about AI. In an analysis of FORDISC, a database of skull measurements used to identify human remains, Iris Clever demonstrates how a focus on accuracy might struggle to account for the entwined relationship between humanity, science, and technology. She argues that because the ideology of nineteenth-century race sciences continues to configure the collection, organization, and reuse of data in FORDISC, improvements related to accuracy can be deeply misleading and further codify the global datafication of race in the sciences. How might a historical approach to “accuracy” enrich the ways that we understand one of the most fundamental concepts of statistical reckoning? This talk suggests how humanistic inquiry can help us think beyond accuracy. Iris Clever is a postdoctoral researcher at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago. She has also been named an iSchool Research Fellow at the University of Illinois for 2024–26. 

Respondent: Cris Hughes, clinical associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign