Not Just Math
Because what we do is not just math.
Mathematicians, computer scientists, software engineers. Statisticians, data scientists, roboticists. While some of us work in more applied and others in more theoretical settings, collectively we are designing, building, and deploying systems that people across the world interact with. From speech recognition to self driving cars, from predictive policing to video generation, our work is impactful, and we are the people best positioned to ensure that those impacts are more good than bad.
It is our responsibility,
as the community conjuring new powers into our world, to be educated about how the tools we are building are used and whom they affect.
Not Just Math
is an organization supporting efforts within our community to better understand and engage with the impacts of our work. We also provide resources to the public, for providing feedback regarding how new technologies affect them, and to advocate for changes.
Below are just a few examples of new technologies that are impacting communities around the world.
Social services, US
Across the US, local governments are turning to algorithmic systems to mediate social services, from foster care to housing assistance to adjudicating bail.
Scanning actors, Hollywood
AI is increasingly able to generate novel videos from the scanned digital imprint of a person. Today, the use of such technologies is being negotiated in Hollywood.
Surveillance, worldwide
Daily life involves interacting with increasingly pervasive surveillance technologies, which are proliferating around the globe.
Science has been victorious over the prejudices that opposed its progress, because it has conferred power, and especially power in war. For such reasons, there is now little active opposition to scientific technique and scientific methods of investigation. But power without wisdom is dangerous, and what our age needs is wisdom even more than knowledge.
Given wisdom, the power conferred by science can give a new degree of well-being to all mankind; without wisdom, it can bring only destruction.
-Bertrand Russell, Nature and Origin of Scientific Method, BBC broadcast transcript, (May 27 1948)
