The Schwartz Reisman Media Club is a bi-weekly meeting series in which we take a piece of fiction—short story, film, TV show—as a jumping-off point for a casual conversation about challenging issues at the intersection of technology and the human world, and imagining the impacts of artificial intelligence.

Our ongoing theme for the next few meetings of the Media Club is “AI and the popular imagination,” focusing on how fictional accounts of AI and data can spark discussion about the roles of AI in our own world.

In this inaugural session, we’re discussing the benefits and hazards of big data, through a reading of the short story “The things that make me weak and strange get engineered away,” by Cory Doctorow, with the optional scholarly accompaniment of “Ethics of identity in a time of big data,” by philosopher James Brusseau.

The SRI Media Club is hosted and organized by Benjamin Wald, an alumnus of the University of Toronto’s Department of Philosophy (PhD, 2017) and currently a Schwartz Reisman postdoctoral fellow in ethics.

Join us for a lively discussion as we meet online during COVID-19. Visit this link to register. Media Club events are free and open to the public.

Illustration by Red Nose Studio.