Owen King PIAI Colloquium Series 鈥� "Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Practical and Automated Prediction"
3:00 PM 鈥� 5:00 PM
The Department of Philosophy and School of Computing Colloquium Series presents
Owen King (University of Twente),
"Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Practical and Automated Prediction"
Date: Thursday, January 30th, 2020
Time: 3:00 pm
Watson Hall, Room 517
Some seemingly innocent predictions turn out to be not so innocent after all. This is so with self-fulfilling prophecies, which are predictions that somehow bring about their own truth. In this talk, I will present philosophical research on self-fulfilling prophecies, with special attention to contexts of practical prediction. The focus on practical prediction, as opposed to scientific prediction, is motivated by the aim of addressing self-fulfilling prophecies in the use of predictive analytics. After introducing several examples, I will lay out a general theory and definition of self-fulfilling prophecy. Then I will develop a normative analysis. This analysis comes in four layers, reflecting interrelated problems regarding both moral and epistemic responsibility. I will close with a brief discussion of the risk of recommender systems producing self-fulfilling predictions of consumer preferences.
EVERYONE WELCOME
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