[NEWS] Why AI needs more social workers, with Columbia University’s Desmond Patton – Loganspace

0
209
[NEWS] Why AI needs more social workers, with Columbia University’s Desmond Patton – Loganspace


Once in a whereas it doesappear all the tech alternate might perhaps well consume any individual to discuss with, appreciate a appropriate therapist or social worker. That might perhaps well sound appreciate an insult, but I imply it largely earnestly: I am a chaplain who has spent 15 years speaking with college students, school, and other leaders at Harvard (and more currentlyMIT as well), largely nonreligious and skeptical contributors appreciate me, about their struggles to resolve out what it methodology to make a meaningful occupation and a elegant life, in a world stout of insecurity, instability, and divisiveness of all kinds.

In connected news, I currently took a year-prolonged paidsabbaticalfrom my work at Harvard and MIT, to command 2019-20 investigating the ethics of technology and alternate (in conjunction with by writingthis column at TechCrunch). I doubt this can shock you to hear I’ve encountered somewhat loads of amoral habits in tech, to this level.

A much less anticipated and most likely more profound discovering, nonetheless, has been what the introspective founder Priyag Narula ofLeadGeniustweeted at me currently: that in the abet of the hubris and Machiavellianism one can acquire in tech companies is a persevering with combat with terror and an abiding feeling of inadequacy among tech leaders.

In tech, good appreciate at locations appreciate Harvard and MIT, contributors are careworn out. They’re hurting, whether or now not or now not they even perceive it.

So when Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Web and Society currently posted an editorial whose headline began, “Why AI Desires Social Workers…”… it caught my gaze.

The article, it appears to be like to be, changed into as soon as written byColumbia CollegeProfessor Desmond Patton. Patton is a Public Interest Technologist and pioneer in the utilization of social media and synthetic intelligence in the perceive of gun violence. The founding Director of Columbia’sSAFElaband Companion Professor of Social Work, Sociology and Files Science at Columbia College.

desmond cropped 800x800

Desmond Patton. Describe by job of Desmond Patton / Stern Strategy Group

A educated social worker and decorated social work pupil, Patton has also change correct into a broad name in AI circles in latest years. If Huge Tech ever determined to rent a Chief Social Work Officer, he’d be a sought-after candidate.

It further appears to be like to be that Patton’s skills — in online violence & its relationship to violent acts in the categorical world — has been all too “hot” a subject topic this previous week, with mass murderers in both El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio having been deeply immersed in online worlds of hatred which reputedly helped consequence of their violent acts.

Fortunately, we have Patton to serve us perceive all of these concerns. Here is my conversation with him: on violence and trauma in tech on and offline, and how social workers might perhaps well serve; on lethal hip-hop beefs and “Web Banging” (a time duration Patton coined); hiring formerly gang-alive to early life as “arena consultants” to strengthen AI; straightforward ideas to maintain the probably rising phenomenon of white supremacists reside-streaming barbaric acts; and on the economics of inclusion throughout tech.

Greg Epstein:How did you switch out working in both social work and tech?

Desmond Patton:At the guts of my work is an hobby in root causes of neighborhood-based entirely mostly violence, so I’ve frequently identified as a social worker that does violence-based entirely mostly study. [At the University of Chicago] my dissertation targeted on how young African American males navigated violence of their neighborhood on the west aspect of town whereas best possible appealing of their school ambiance.

[From that work] I realized more in regards to the characteristic of social media of their lives. This changed into as soon as around 2011, 2012, and one of many things that kept coming by in interviews with these young males changed into as soon as how social media changed into as soon as a critical tool for navigating both safe and unsafe locations, but also an ambiance that allowed them to mission a multitude of selves. To be a college self, to be a neighborhood self, to be who they in point of fact wanted to be, to ascertain out out unique identities.

Leave a Reply