Protecting Society From AI Harms: Amnesty International’s Matt Mahmoudi and Damini Satija (Part Two)

At Amnesty Tech, a division of human rights organization Amnesty International, Damini Satija and Matt Mahmoudi leverage their expertise in technology and public policy to examine the use of AI in the public sector and its impact on citizens worldwide.

In Part 1 of Matt and Damini’s conversation with Sam and Shervin, they described scenarios in which AI tools can put human rights at risk and how their work is helping to expose those risks and protect people from the technology’s misuse. In this episode, they resume their conversation and dig deeper into the ways AI regulations can limit the negative use of AI at scale. Matt and Damini also caution us about what a dystopian future might hold and point to specific ways leaders in the corporate world can help limit the harms of AI. Read this episode's transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

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Guest bios:

Matt Mahmoudi is a lecturer, researcher, and organizer. He’s been leading Amnesty International’s research and advocacy efforts on banning facial recognition technologies and exposing their uses against racialized communities, from New York City to the occupied Palestinian territories. He was the inaugural recipient of the Jo Cox Ph.D. scholarship at the University of Cambridge, where he studied digital urban infrastructures as new frontiers for racial capitalism and remains an affiliated lecturer in sociology. His work has appeared in the journals The Sociological Review and International Political Sociology and the book Digital Witness (Oxford University Press, 2020). His forthcoming book is Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (University of California Press, 2023).

Damini Satija is a human rights and public policy expert working on data and artificial intelligence, with a focus on algorithmic discrimination, welfare automation, government surveillance, and tech equity. She is head of the Algorithmic Accountability Lab and a deputy director at Amnesty Tech. She previously worked as an adviser to the U.K. government on data and AI ethics and represented the U.K. as a policy expert on AI and human rights at the Council of Europe. She has a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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