Data & Society

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping many aspects of our daily lives: from the way people are hired for jobs, to how housing applications are reviewed, to how government services are delivered in healthcare, education, and beyond. But while organizations of all kinds have been introducing AI systems into their core functions, there is uncertainty about how they are working — including who is on the receiving end of their benefits and harms. What do we need to know about AI and automated decision-making tools today? How can we better understand the technology’s influence, and make informed decisions about where and how to use it?

About 'Understanding AI'

In the fall of 2025, The New York Public Library and Data & Society collaborated to present “Understanding AI,” a four-part live event series exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence and its impacts on democracy, the environment, and human labor. Featuring key figures in the AI ethics field, these events took place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)in New York City as part of the library’s7 Stories Up program, and are now available for all to watch.

Revisit the series

In this moment of AI ascendance and data center accelerationism, there are thousands of tech workers who are concerned about the realities of climate change and see the tech industry’s growing role in it — and who are actively working to create change, develop better tools, and organize for collective action. In her report "Turning the Tide: Climate Action in and Against Tech," Climate, Technology, and Justice Program Director Tamara Kneese examines the ways these workers have attempted to reform the tech industry from within while applying external forms of pressure through policymaking and activism. By engaging in workplace activism and forming broader coalitions with environmental justice organizations, climate conscious tech workers who adhere to the organizer mindset use their insider knowledge to advocate for social change rather than technical tweaks. What does that look like in practice? 

Read Turning the Tide: Climate Action in and Against Tech

Learn more about the event and its speakers.

Democracy faces challenges worldwide, and artificial intelligence has become an increasing part of that. In their book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, cybersecurity technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan E. Sanders methodically unpack the ways AI is changing every aspect of democracy, while making the case that we can harness the technology to support and strengthen these systems. Neither fear-mongering nor utopian, Rewiring Democracy aims to present a clear-eyed and optimistic path for putting democratic principles at the heart of AI development — highlighting how citizens, public servants, and elected officials can use AI to expand access to justice and inform, empower, and engage the public.

On October 23, the authors discussed their book with Data & Society’s Director of Research Alice Marwick, walking us through their roadmap for understanding how AI is changing power and participation and what we can do to shape that change for the better.

Visit datasociety.net for to learn more about this Book Talk's speakers, access resources and referenced materials, and to purchase copies of The AI Con and Empire of AI.

Purchase copies of these books from our Bookshop:

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao

Recorded on May 6, 2025 at The Greene Space in NYC 

Featuring Dr. Julián Posada and Aiha Nguyen 

Resources and recordings are available here: https://datasociety.net/events/what-is-work-worth/

Books

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Tamara Kneese)

The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City (Alexis Madrigal)

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (Xiaowei Wang)

At the turn of the 20th century, the anti-immigration and eugenics movements used data about marginalized people to fuel racial divisions and political violence under the guise of streamlining society toward the future. Today, as the tech industry champions itself as a global leader of progress and innovation, we are falling into the same trap.

On April 10th, Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UCP 2025 and open access), joined Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru for a discussion of the 21st century eugenics revival in big tech and how to resist it in a conversation moderated by Trustworthy Infrastructures Program Director Maia Woluchem. Predatory Data is the first book to draw this direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes. Torres and Gebru have also extensively studied the second wave of eugenics, identifying a suite of tech-utopian ideologies they call the TESCREAL bundle.

Purchase your own copy of Anita Say Chan’s book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9780520402843.

Learn more about the event at datasociety.net (https://datasociety.net/events/resisting-predatory-data/).

Two years ago, we were told that ‘prompt engineer’ would be a real job — well, it’s not. Is generative AI actually going to replace and transform human labour, or is this just another shallow marketing narrative?

In this episode of Computer Says Maybe, host Alix Dunn speaks with Data & Society researchers Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, authors of the primer Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work. They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labor are being devalued by AI — especially traditionally feminized work like caregiving.

Further reading:

• Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work by Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu
• Blood in the Machine by Brain Merchant

Aiha Nguyen is the Program Director for the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society where she guides research and engagement. She brings a practitioner's perspective to this role having worked for over a decade in community and worker advocacy and organizing. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor, technology, and urban studies. She is author of The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance and co-author of ‘At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers’, and ‘Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype and Value at Work’.

Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher on the Labor Futures team at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she investigates the impacts of digital surveillance, AI, and algorithmic power within the workplace. As an ethnographer, her past work has led her to explore the role of worker data and its commodification, the intersections of care labor and digital platforms, automation within service industries, and generative AI in creative industries. She is also a 2024-2025 Fellow at the Siegel Family Endowment.

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Physical and digital infrastructures have raised tensions around the world, seeding land disputes, climate effects, and disrupting social fabrics. Yet they are also intertwined with myths of progress, transformation, and speculation. To explore these themes, we were joined by Nia Johnson, Ekene Ijeoma, and Lori Regattieri — academics, practitioners, and artists who are each, in their own way, responding to the ways digital infrastructures are transforming the built, natural, and social environments. In a conversation moderated by Trustworthy Infrastructures Program Director Maia Woluchem, we broke down confrontations between technological infrastructures and local communities and discussed how to  reshape narratives of process, power, change, and futurity.

This public panel is part of Connective (t)Issues, a Data & Society workshop organized by the Trustworthy Infrastructures program in partnership with Duke Science & Society. Learn more about the workshop at datasociety.net. 

https://datasociety.net/announcements/2024/11/20/connective-tissues/

What exactly is generative AI (genAI) red-teaming? What strategies and standards should guide its implementation? And how can it protect the public interest? In this conversation, Lama Ahmad, Camille François, Tarleton Gillespie, Briana Vecchione, and Borhane Blili-Hamelin examined red-teaming’s place in the evolving landscape of genAI evaluation and governance.

Our discussion drew on a new report by Data & Society (D&S) and AI Risk and Vulnerability Alliance (ARVA), a nonprofit that aims to empower communities to recognize, diagnose, and manage harmful flaws in AI. The report, Red-Teaming in the Public Interest, investigates how red-teaming methods are being adapted to confront uncertainty about flaws in systems and to encourage public engagement with the evaluation and oversight of genAI systems. Red-teaming offers a flexible approach to uncovering a wide range of problems with genAI models. It also offers new opportunities for incorporating diverse communities into AI governance practices.

Ultimately, we hope this report and discussion present a vision of red-teaming as an area of public interest sociotechnical experimentation.

Download the report and learn more about the speakers and references at datasociety.net.

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00:00 Opening

00:12 Welcome and Framing

04:48 Panel Introductions

09:34 Discussion Overview

10:23 Lama Ahmad on The Value of Human Red-Teaming

17:37 Tarleton Gillespie on Labor and Content Moderation Antecedents

25:03 Briana Vecchione on Participation & Accountability

28:25 Camille François on Global Policy and Open-source Infrastructure

35:09 Questions and Answers

56:39 Final Takeaways