Dignity-Centred Technology: Enabling Human Flourishing. With Lorenn Ruster and Thea Snow

My guests today are Lorenn Ruster and Thea Snow. Lorenn has recently completed her Masters at the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University and Thea is the Director at the Centre for Public Impact for Australia and New Zealand.

Lorenn and Thea are speaking at the 2021 Response-ability Summit on May 20-21. Their talk is titled, "Dignity-centred technology — moving beyond protecting harms to enabling human flourishing". Thea and Lorenn explain how they came to work together, and their respective backgrounds.

Lorenn shares her experience as a Masters student at the 3A Institute, which was established by anthropologist, Genevieve Bell, and the aims of the Institute, which is to "build the skills and knowledge needed to help shape the future safely, sustainably and responsibly".

Thea describes the Centre for Public Impact's work, which is to re-imagine government, and together Lorenn and Thea share their dignity ecosystem model, which is a different way into a conversation about ethics in artificial intelligence.

We discuss how their model might be used by technology companies as well as governments, given their model focuses on proactively enabling human flourishing rather than simply harm minimisation.

You can download their report, Exploring the role of dignity in government AI ethics instruments, from the CPI website.

Find Lorenn on Twitter at @LorennRuster and on Medium.  Find Thea on Twitter at @theasnow and on Medium. Follow the CPI at @CPI_foundation.