Professor Karen Yeung, University of Birmingham is the latest speaker in our Futures Lecture Series.

“In this lecture, I sketch the content and contours of a deliberately over-simplified contemporary fairytale which I refer to as the ‘Digital Enchantment’. It is comprised of three core tenets: digital solutionism, the absence of ill-effects doctrine, and the celebration of unfettered innovation as one of the noblest and highest callings of this present age. I will seek to unpack this fairytale to demonstrate its enduring, universal appeal, while highlighting the dangers of falling under its spell due to a continued failure to separate fantasy from reality. I argue that the challenge that we urgently face in navigating sweeping ongoing digital transformation is to develop means for drawing on the power of the Enchantment’s appeal in ways that enable us to proceed in a more careful, deliberative, and clear-eyed fashion in order to reap the best of human creativity that lies at the heart of innovation in the service of flourishing human communities.”

Speaker Biography

Karen Yeung is an Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Informatics at the University of Birmingham in the School of Law and the School of Computer Science, having held previous appointments at King’s College London and Oxford University. Does her research expertise lie in? the regulation and governance of, and through, new and emerging technologies, with her more recent and ongoing work focusing on the legal, ethical, social, and democratic implications of a suite of technologies associated with automation and the ‘computational turn’, including big data analytics, artificial intelligence (including various forms of machine learning), distributed ledger technologies (including blockchain) and robotics.?Her work has been at the forefront of understanding the challenges associated with the regulation and governance of emerging technologies and she has been actively involved in technology policy and related initiatives at the national, European, and international levels including the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI, the Council of Europe and the UN. Do her academic publications include Algorithmic Regulation (co-edited with Martin Lodge) Oxford University Press (2019) and The? Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation, and Technology (co-edited with Roger Brownsword and Eloise Scotford) in 2017.? She is on the editorial boards of the Modern Law Review, Big Data & Society, Public Law and Technology and Regulation, and the? Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law.

Please note, that joining instructions to Zoom will be included in your confirmation email. Zoom details will also be resent via email on the day of the event.

As this is a Zoom webinar, participants’ cameras will be off. We will have a dedicated Q&A box for questions and participants can be invited to turn their microphones on if they wish to ask their questions out loud.

The seminar will also be recorded on the day and may be used in the future.

Registration

Time: 11:00 — 12:30 EST

Free!