Thea Snow
Director
Thea Snow leads the CPI’s (Centre for Public Impact) work in Australia and New Zealand. Thea’s experience spans the private, public and not-for-profit sectors; she has worked as a lawyer, a civil servant, and as part of Nesta’s Government Innovation Team.
Thea recently returned to Melbourne after spending a few years in London where, in addition to working at Nesta, she completed an MSc PPA at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Dignity-centred technology – moving beyond protecting from harms to enabling human flourishing
There is so much focus on the harms that technologies of the future can and do bring. And rightly so — we’ve seen so many instances where technologies have deepened inequalities and undermined democracy. Undoubtedly we have a responsibility to reduce these harms of technologies and protect ourselves, and future generations from their impacts. However, don’t we also have a responsibility to proactively enable human flourishing? To create the conditions for the best possible upside to technologies, not just managing the downside?
At the Centre for Public Impact, we’re interested in reimagining the role of governments around the world. We believe that the role is not just about managing risk, delivering services and protecting citizens, but also about supporting people to live their best lives. Over the past few months we’ve been exploring how AI Ethics instruments present in the governments of Australia, Canada and the UK enable a Dignity Ecosystem.
Our Dignity Ecosystem takes a dynamic view of dignity — ever-present, but not immune to the system within which it sits. Both protective and proactive roles are important to keep the Dignity Ecosystem in balance.
We’ve found an imbalanced Dignity Ecosystem, with an emphasis on governments playing protective roles and less focus on proactive ones. Together, we hope to reimagine how governments can enable dignity-centred technologies and in doing so create conditions for both protective and proactive measures to realise dignity for all.
Our talk will share some findings from our research on dignity in government AI Ethics instruments in an effort to open a conversation around how to embrace technologies with dignity at the centre.
Co-presented with Lorenn Ruster.