The “Machines That Fail Us” conference is taking place at the University of St. Gallen on June 24th

“Machines that Fail Us”: Building a Public debate about AI Errors, their Human Rights Implications, and our Democratic Futures.

📅 June 24th 2024 – 10am to 6pm

📍 SQUARE, University of St. Gallen

“Machines That Fail Us” brings together actors from academia, journalism, civil society, and the tech industry to discuss the impacts of AI failures, hallucinations, and errors. This event will gather critical voices of some of the most committed individuals working towards a better future with artificial intelligence. We invite you all to join us, registration is required.

AI technologies and algorithms are progressively employed across diverse sectors, spanning from educational institutions and healthcare professionals to employers and government agencies, for evaluating and deciding upon different facets of our lives. Yet, it begs the fundamental question: Do these systems truly exhibit impartiality and fairness when analysing individuals and their behaviour? Our stance is that they do not. Ironically, despite their professed aim of enhancing objectivity and effectiveness, these technologies contain inherent biases and inaccuracies, particularly in terms of human profiling.

During the three years of “The Human Error Project”, we examined how journalists, civil society organizations and tech entrepreneurs in Europe deal with AI errors and how they negotiate and coexist with the impact of AI on human rights. During this we will present our research results and work together with the audience on two workshops questioning how to build more sustainable AI futures.

The event will feature two workshops on AI regulation and one the building alternative futures with AI, a keynote speech by Prof. Stefania Milan from the University of Amsterdam and a discussion panel with Luca Zorloni, Head of Digital at Wired, Ilia Siatista, Programme Director and Senior Legal Officer at Privacy International and Lorna Goulden, Founder of the Twinds Foundation.

The event is funded through a grant provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation “Agora” scheme. Together with this event, we are also producing the “Machines That Fail Us” podcast series. You can listen to all the episodes here and on all major audio platforms. The next episodes of the podcast will be released until July.

The event is free to the public, but registration is required. You can register here.

See the digital flyers for all the information and the event’s full schedule: