Jonathan Zittrain: Remember your humanity

“My job as a law professor is to turn all the dials to 11,” said Jonathan Zittrain as he gleefully challenged participants at the Collective Intelligence 2012 conference.

Quoting from the 1955 anti-nuclear weapon manifesto signed by Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and others, he urged the developers of collective intelligence platforms to “respect the humanity of the people caught up in them.”

From his abstract:

Platforms for distributed labor offer the efficiency of breaking large tasks into discrete pieces, often in ways that obscure the purpose of the whole to which a piece contributes. When should clickworkers seek and accept responsibility for the ethical valence of a task commissioner’s aims, especially when a task does not signal anything about its larger purpose?

More videos from the conference.

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