When sociologist Manisha Desai talks about artificial intelligence, she doesn’t start with algorithms. She starts with power.
“Technologies reproduce the inequalities of the society in which they’re created,” she said in an interview. For Desai, executive director of Stony Brook’s Center for Changing Systems of Power and Empowerment Trust Endowed Professor of Global Citizenship, AI is simply the newest arena where old hierarchies — gendered, racial, colonial and economic — are being rewritten into code.
This long-standing critical lens is at the heart of a funded project on the practice of democracy and academic freedom, which Desai is partnering alongside Michael Rubenstein (professor, the Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Sciences), Abena Asare (associate professor, Africana Studies, CAS), and Robert Chase (associate professor, Department of History, CAS). The funding supports research on historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments, will support a multi-year project at Stony Brook, beginning with a symposium.
Desai’s work sits at the intersection of gender, globalization, feminism, climate justice, and human rights. She’s a senior research associate of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), and a member of the Global Network for Research and Action for a New Eco-Social Contract. Across these roles, she keeps returning to one question: who benefits from change, and who pays the price?
Rather than focusing only on AI and the future of learning, as many initiatives do, Desai and her collaborators will focus on how AI practices shape the practice of democracy and academic freedom at institutions.
“As a public university, our job has to be more critical than simply accepting AI because it’s there and becoming ubiquitous,” Desai said. “We don’t have to go with the flow.”
Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.
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