Book Launch: Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car
A conversation with Maya Indira Ganesh on how driverless cars are reshaping governance, responsibility, and values
What can a driverless car tell us about power, ethics, and the dreams we attach to technology?
Join us at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the launch of Dr Maya Indira Ganesh's new book, Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car, exploring this question. Auto-Correct offers an in-depth examination of the cultural and ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence, with a focus on autonomous systems like driverless cars.
The book explores how and if ethics can be integrated into driverless cars and examines the infamous trolley problem – an ethical dilemma once proposed to inform how driverless cars might make decisions in life-threatening situations. Auto-Correct examines the limits of ethical decision-making being automated, and the implications of ‘machine ethics’, a niche yet popular approach to programming computational decision-making, for our understanding of responsibility and values in the present and future worlds with AI. The book is a study of the cultural and material politics of automation, and the role of language and discourse in advancing the compelling fiction of ethical, autonomous, and intelligent machines. This is not only a philosophical work but also offers insights into the future development of autonomous technologies and the ethical frameworks that will play a role in their evolution.
Auto-Correct is published by ArtEZ Press, ArtEZ University of the Arts, the Netherlands, and distributed by Ideas Books, Amsterdam. Read the first chapter of the book and order your copy here.
Programme
Maya Indira Ganesh will be in conversation with artist, writer, and researcher, Dr Georgina Voss, and Professor of Digital Innovation and Smart Places at Anglia Ruskin University, Dr Jennifer Schooling.
This event is supported by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Newnham College, and the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy.
Dr Maya Indira Ganesh is Associate Director (Research partnerships) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. From 2021-2024, she was an Assistant Teaching Professor at the university to co-develop and direct a master’s program in AI, Ethics & Society. Prior to academic work, Maya was a researcher working with civil society organisations in India, SE Asia, and Europe on gender justice, digital security, and freedom of speech and expression. She is also an invited speaker, curatorial advisor, and essayist specialising in media arts, culture, and technology. Maya has a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car is drawn from her doctoral thesis. More about her here: www.lcfi.ac.uk and www.bodyofwork.in.