The Frontier Technology network nodes

A brand-new endeavour based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge. Under the leadership of CRASSH Director, Professor Steven Connor, and Advisory Board Chair, Professor John Naughton, the Centre brings decades of experience in leading cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and maximising public engagement.  The Centre will begin its work-program by developing projects under four themes typically neglected in discussions of technology futures: public discourse, work, environment, and trust. The Centre will place a spotlight on tech narratives about AI, machine-learning, and the deterministic thinking that accompanies them. It will refocus the conversation on the future of work to consider the meaning work brings to people’s lives, and the significance for democracy when it is taken away. It will reveal the hidden environmental impacts of digital technology, from the minerals and metals extracted to make hardware, to the emissions generated from data centres. Finally, it will graft these questions onto the landscape of trust and trustworthiness: in public institutions, in companies, and in each other.

Emeritus Professor of Public Understanding of Technology, John Naughton, Chair of the Advisory Board for the Cambridge node, believes the network has the appropriate strategic experience to work collectively on serious regulation of the business model of technology companies. “We know enough about the business model and political tactics of companies like Facebook and Google now. We know what to target, and how, and we’ll be operating with intellectual firepower around the world to go after it,” Professor Naughton said.

The Minderoo Initiative on Technology and Power will critically investigate the social impact of digital technologies on communities and the broader public good. It will create new paradigms for the public to understand the harms of tech platforms, predictive technologies, advertising-driven algorithmic content, and the work of digital labourers. The Minderoo Initiative’s work program draws heavily from the intellectual contributions of its Co-Directors, Professors Safiya Umoja Noble and Sarah T. Roberts. Both scholars are at the forefront of uncovering and exposing the darkest corners of tech’s power and politics. Professor Roberts’ work reveals the low-paid and precarious labour holding up much of the tech ecosystem, and Professor Noble’s work shows the structural racism baked into the infrastructure of commercial search and advertising-driven algorithmic content.

Co-Director of the UCLA Initiative and author of the critically-acclaimed book, Algorithms of Oppression, Professor Noble said, “We are at a critical juncture where abolitionist and restorative interventions must be considered in the face of mounting social harms from internet-based technologies. This new Minderoo Initiative situates us as part of a global network of scholars, journalists, makers, and artists who care deeply about these issues and we hope this gift is the first of many transformational investments that will help us make a long-term impact for change and repair.”

Minderoo Foundation is co-designing and supporting a bespoke Challenge Fund at the University of Oxford, to be administered by the Oxford Humanities Division. Providing seed funding to student, faculty, and community projects of varying lengths and budgets, the Fund will catalyse a dramatic expansion of the notion of artificial intelligence ethics, to fully embrace the seismic challenges that contemporary digital technologies pose to labour, institutions, and public scrutiny, by stimulating new investigative research and public education and engagement projects drawn from many different fields: history, art, performance, linguistics, governance, community projects, and more.