Canceled - Public Lecture with Allison Stanger

Date: 

Thursday, March 26, 2020, 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Location: 

Wexner 436, Harvard Kennedy School

Update March 23: 

We are working on a new format for this event, which is likely to be a pre-recorded conversation between Allison Stanger and Danielle Allen. We will update with full details as soon as we have them.

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We have canceled all public lectures, workshops, conferences, and in-person events for the rest of the semester, due to Harvard's latest guidance on preventing the spread of coronavirus.

We are working on alternative online-only presentations for our remaining public lecture speakers when possible, and will communicate those details as they are settled. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Allison stanger poster

Title: Justice and Inequality in a Big Data World: Why Machine Learning Should Not be Left to its Own Devices. 

Description: In her lecture, titled “Justice and Inequality in a Big Data World: Why Machine Learning Should Not be Left to its Own Devices,” Professor Stanger explores the consequences of government and corporate data harvesting for the viability of liberal democratic and authoritarian regimes. Comparing the United States and China, she argues that differing relationships between business and government, framed by the competing core values of each political regime, shape ethical choices in ways that give authoritarianism comparative advantage. These differences have implications for American national security, citizenship, and the moral limits of AI-driven decision-making tools. 

Allison Stanger is Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.  She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and  One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Sphere in a Big Data World.  Stanger is a contributing writer for the Atlantic and has testified before Congress on five occasions. In 2020-21, she will be the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress and a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow at Stanford University.