Event Information:
In this lecture, Professor Karen Yeung sketches out the content and contours of a deliberately over-simplified contemporary fairytale which she refers 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. Prof Yeung 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. She argues 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 Bio
Karen Yeung is 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. Her research expertise lies in the regulation and governance of, and through, new and emerging technologies, with her more recent and on-going 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 several 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. 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.
The session is chaired by Prof Shannon Vallor, The Centre of Technomoral Futures Director, and the Baillie Gifford Professor in Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and The University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy.
About the Series
A new lecture series at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the University of Edinburgh, showcasing pioneering interdisciplinary work across the sciences and humanities.
The Futures Lecture series will feature high-profile guests who have redefined interdisciplinary research by making unexpected connections across fields and methodologies.
*We are delighted to continue the Futures lecture series in 2021-2022 with the following list of upcoming events organised and chaired by Professor Michela Massimi for EFI:*
For more information, on past and future schedules please visit the Edinburgh Futures Institute website: