What a delight to interview Designer, Programmer, and Fair Data Expert Laura Summers.
“A lot of design is thinking about human impacts and human consequences, so it’s felt like a very natural evolution [to work in fairness and ethics in AI]”
“It doesn’t feel to me like the questions or the challenges being raised by AI are even particularly new or particularly different from the challenges we’ve already had in Software Engineering. If anything just a little bit more existential and pointed because the scale of them can be so big.”
“We’re all just Dories from Finding Nemo, swimming around and forgetting what happened 5 seconds ago. The short term memory of the tech industry as a whole is astonishingly short. We have to be perhaps a little bit more thoughtful and better rounded, and reach outside our discipline to think about human consequences.”
“It’s actually interesting to observe the things people are trying to do with data as a way of assessing our civilisational maturity.”
“Some of the things that I am most attracted by at the moment are people doing really beautiful, or really quirky, or really huge data visualisations. I find these things so intriguing, they set your mind down a bunch of different pathways it might not have taken already.”
