Peter Galison
AI Has No Judgment
In the age of AI, judgment, like so many of our concepts, is redefined bit by bit, voided of scope, ethics, and affect. What is judgment, what do we want from it in law, war, and medicine; how does the repetitive encounter with AI diminish what we want of our own faculty of assessment and distinction? Through examples from bail setting, collateral damage estimation, and MRI diagnostics, my aim is to understand not just how we train artificial intelligence to make judgments but how it is retraining us to desiccate our own grasp of what judgment is.
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University and a renowned historian of science; he also serves as a board member for the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Galison currently directs the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, a leading center for interdisciplinary research on black holes. He has examined links between the history of science and neighboring fields—how, for example, historians of science and historians of art share methods and strategies. He is now turning to a history of postwar quantum field theory. His books include How Experiments End (1987); Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997); Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003); and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007). His latest feature film is Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know (2020).