Thursday, May 08, 2025
11:40am – 1:15 pm
Rachel Carson College 301 + Zoom (registration)
On Thursday, May 08 at 11:40 am, you are invited to gather in Rachel Carson College 301 or on Zoom for a talk with UC Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellow Shazeda Ahmed on Artificial Intelligence (Re)Invents Itself: AI Safety and the Rise of Epistemic Monoculture.
How did speculation about artificial general intelligence (AGI) transform from a niche thought experiment into a premise that policymakers and news media treat as an inevitability? Where did the idea of AI as an ‘existential risk’ to human life emerge?
The emerging field of “AI safety” has attracted public attention and large infusions of capital to support its implied promise: deployment of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems while reducing their gravest risks. Ideas from effective altruism, longtermism, and the study of existential risk are foundational to this new field. In this talk, Dr. Shazeda Ahmed shows how overlapping communities interested in these ideas merged to pursue what they refer to as “field-building,” and how this is sustained through mutually reinforcing community-building and knowledge production practices at four sites in this community’s epistemic culture: 1) online community-building through career advising and web forums; 2) AI forecasting; 3) AI safety research; and 4) prize competitions. She will then share preliminary findings from an interview study with members of the epistemic community who work on the “alignment problem” of attempting to align AI systems with human values. The dispersal of the AI safety epistemic community throughout industry, academia, and policy organizations ensures their continued input into global discourse about AI. Understanding the epistemic culture that fuses their moral convictions and knowledge claims is crucial to evaluating these claims, which are gaining influence in critical, rapidly changing debates about the harms of AI and how to mitigate them.
Co-hosted by the Sociology Department, the Science & Justice Research Center, and the UCSC Data + Ethics Working Group.
Shazeda Ahmed is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program) fellow at UCLA’s Center on Race and Digital Justice. She completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Shazeda has been a research fellow at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute, and NYU’s AI Now Institute.
Shazeda’s research investigates relationships between the state, the firm, and society in the US-China geopolitical rivalry over AI, with implications for information technology policy and human rights. Her work draws from science and technology studies, ranging from her dissertation on the state-firm co-production of China’s social credit system, to her research on the epistemic culture and knowledge production practices in the emerging field of AI safety.
