5th Annual Civics of Technology Online Conference: Against Tech Hype
August 6 @ 11:00 am – August 7 @ 3:00 pm
Hype, hope, disappointment.
Hype is the rhetoric of tech billionaires, of VCs, of tech-pushers, of AI boosters and AI doomers. Hype is about attention, grabbing it, holding it. Hype is about resources, gathering them, directing them. Hype is about control.
Tech hype is a problem for our society and our schools. It points our time, our energy, our attention, and our resources in the wrong direction. It obstructs our reasoning and impedes our decision-making.
Join us as we work against tech hype, and toward humane and just futures.
Keynote Speakers
Thursday, August 6: Dr. Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech(A CoT book club book!) and Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, and appeared in the 2020 documentary film Coded Bias. Her work provides a powerful corrective to dominant “technochauvinist” narratives. She has challenged the presumed neutrality of technology and researches AI ethics and data analysis for social good.
Friday, August 7: Natasha Singer has covered tech industry influence in schools for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her early reporting on school tech helped prompt California to enact the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA), a landmark student privacy law. This year she is reporting on how tech giants like Google and OpenAI are driving A.I. adoption in schools while teachers are working to equip students to ask deeper questions about the societal impacts. Her recent work includes stories about the tech backlash in schools, teens’ use of AI chatbots, and efforts to promote AI literacy. Her forthcoming book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools,” will be published by W.W. Norton in September. (We will be hosting a book club for it!)
Click here to learn more and register to attend. This conference is fully virtual.