Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Ireland, Intellectual Property And The Political Economy Of Information Monopolies, Kenneth W. Murphy

Articles

Ireland’s policies towards US-owned global digital intermediaries (Big Tech) have emerged as an international political issue and received global media attention. So far, political and media focus has been on the impact of Ireland’s tax policies on the revenue-raising ability of other European states and perceptions of light touch regulation of those corporations based in the Republic. The current paper will focus on how Ireland’s switch to a focus on capital allowances for the sizeable American tech corporations has enabled the latter to sustain their dominance in the digital transition through incentivizing and subsidizing their switch to assetization as a …

Expectations Of Artificial Intelligence And The Performativity Of Ethics: Implications For Communication Governance, Aphra Kerr, Marguerite Barry, John D. Kelleher

Articles

This article draws on the sociology of expectations to examine the construction of expectations of ‘ethical AI’ and considers the implications of these expectations for communication governance. We first analyse a range of public documents to identify the key actors, mechanisms and issues which structure societal expectations around artificial intelligence (AI) and an emerging discourse on ethics. We then explore expectations of AI and ethics through a survey of members of the public. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the role of AI in communication gover- nance. We find that, despite societal expectations that we can design …

Why Does Film And Television Sci-Fi Tend To Portray Machines As Being Human?, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies, and attempts to explain, a lack of diversity in the way that cinema and television science fiction represents robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a qualitative content analysis of recent film and television portrayals, it is argued, that a limited and limiting vision predominates. This limitation may serve to ideologically reinforce the power of corporate elites. It may also hamper discussion and debate around technological possibilities and their relationship with society.

There has been a slew of entertainment productions since 2013 that represent AI and robotics. This work examines Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Interstellar (2014), Chappie (2015), …

Obtaining Speech Assets For Judgement Analysis On Low-Pass Filtered Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

Investigating the emotional content in speech from acoustic characteristics requires separating the semantic con- tent from the acoustic channel. For natural emotional speech, a widely used method to separate the two channels is the use of cue masking. Our objective is to investigate the use of cue masking in non-acted emotional speech by analyzing the extent to which filtering impacts the perception of emotional content of the modified speech material. However, obtaining a corpus of emotional speech can be quite difficult whereby verifying the emotional content is an issue thoroughly discussed. Currently, speech research is showing a tendency toward constructing …

Icts As An Aid To Inclusivity?: Barriers To Benefits For Adult Learners In The Ennis Information Age Town, Anna Greenhalgh

Masters

The subject of this thesis is the potential role of ICTs as a means of addressing social exclusion. ICTs have been recognised for their double-edged promise: while they may open opportunities in work, education and social practices, their benefits may be inaccessible to disadvantaged members of society. This subject is explored by means of a case study of adult learners who have been exposed to a ‘social experiment’ involving technological endowment of an Irish community: the Ennis Information Age Town project. This large-scale private sector initiative, which ran between 1997 and 2002, has the potential to inform future ICT projects …