Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Speaker: dana boyd, Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University
Title: Avoiding Traps, Tracking Decoys: The Political Economy of AI
Abstract: Popular technologies do not come from thin air. They are nurtured into being, shaped by social forces as much as technical breakthroughs. How they unfold in society is not inevitable, regardless of what a pundit might tell you. Of course, the inevitability rhetoric of pundits is powerful - the rhetoric helps align people towards a particular agenda.
Generative AI involves notable technical advances, but the phenomenon and visioning work propelling it into the public is entangled with a range of economic and political agendas. Even as scientists are racing one another in benchmarking foundation models, the industry is speculatively searching for profitable use cases. This constructed race - whether driven by geopolitical anxieties or corporate competition - is being used to justify not learning lessons from the past, knowingly violating laws, and refusing to create guardrails until absolutely necessary.
In this talk, danah will explore the political economy underpinning AI, interrogating how technologists are falling into well-established traps even as business leaders are successfully tricking the public to focus on staged decoys.
Bio: danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye towards how structural inequities shape and are shaped by technologies. She is currently conducting a multi-year ethnographic study of the US census to understand how data are made legitimate. She has also conducted research on media manipulation, privacy practices, social media, and teen culture. Her monograph "It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens" has received widespread praise. She founded the research institute Data & Society, where she currently serves as an advisor. She is also a fellow of AAAS, a trustee of the Computer History Museum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the advisory board of Electronic Privacy Information Center. Previously, she worked at Microsoft Research. She received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University, a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Ph.D in Information from the University of California, Berkeley.
