Reading: "Habeas Data" and "Artificial Unintelligence"

A journalism doubleheader! Join Cyrus Farivar and Meredith Broussard for an engaging evening covering the cutting edges of technology in America.

You are being watched. Whether through your phone or your car or your credit card, caught on a CCTV camera or tracked through your online viewing history, government agencies know where you are, and are quietly collecting your most intimate, mundane, and personal information. Is this even legal? HABEAS DATA shows how the explosive growth of surveillance technology has outpaced our understanding of the ethics, mores, and laws of privacy.

Cyrus [suh-ROOS] Farivar is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also an author and radio producer. He is based in Oakland, California.

In ARTIFICIAL UNINTELLIGENCE, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Data journalist Meredith Broussard is an assistant professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, an affiliate faculty member at the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at the NYU Center for Data Science, and a 2019 fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.