[khazhoux]

Is this the woke==bad part?

> Their top piece of content was “Data as an instrument of coloniality: A panel discussion on digital and data colonialism”. Do any AI specialists think this work is going to push the bleeding edge of AI research in the UK?

Because I think that speaks directly to his point and has nothing to do with woke wars.

[version_five]

I'd say that's a pretty clear example of why woke==bad. The title reads like something that was made up by the Onion in an attempt to mock a charicature. This kind of garbage draws attention away from actual research.

[khazhoux]

That’s not a fair assessment. Just because this study is not useful in the technical advancement of the field, does not mean that studying social issues is worthless (“woke is bad”). Just that that research should happen somewhere else.

[version_five]

It's my perception of this social justice stuff that it infects everything, because it's somehow become a magic wand that give people power over others. The whole point in this example is that resources from what is ostensibly an computer science research institute is working on fringe left political issues. It wouldn't be ok if they studied "intelligent design" or whatever the current far right is up to either, but politics has managed to infiltrate research so we're all forced to deal with cuture war stuff instead of working on computer science.

[khazhoux]

I look at it like this: it’s exceedingly hard to hire strong technical people. It’s extremely hard to create cutting edge research. It’s as true here as in any research institution, especially (sorry to say it) when it’s not a top tier research institution. And so in those cases, yeah, you will find a lot of not-great research.

And someone else mentioned, here they are paying one or two orders of magnitude less than Google and other top companies for AI/ML researchers. Should we be surprised that they don’t have technical heavy hitters on their staff, or leadership?

[bbor]

Well

A) It's a 90 minute seminar, and literally all the attendees are specialized in social science fields. Seminars aren't exactly breaking the bank I'm guessing.

B) The reason that government doesn't fund stuff like "intelligent design research" is that that's not a scientific topic in the slightest. I'm guessing the words in the title are setting of Culture War alarms for you, but do you really think these issues aren't important to the health of our society? Even more so with the advent of intuitive AI?

Maps and surveys of "new worlds", passport photos and vaccination cards to control the movement of "impure" bodies, accounting spreadsheets used in plantations of enslaved peoples... all of these technologies suggest that data has always been an instrument of colonialism. But can the history of European and American colonialism also help us interpret contemporary phenomena like algorithmic racial violence, quarantine apps and vaccination apartheid, the injustices of the gig economy, and disinformation campaigns that threaten our democratic futures?

https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/data-instrument-coloniality