The AI and Society discourse has previously drawn attention to the ways that digital systems embody the values of the technology development community from which they emerge through the development and deployment process. Research shows how this effect leads to a particular treatment of gender in computer systems development, a treatment which lags far behind the rich understanding of gender that social studies scholarship reveals and people across society experience. Many people do not relate to the narrow binary gender options (...) of male or female, and many people express their gender identity in much richer ways than the sex/gender binary female/woman and male/man Boolean terms will allow. We ask: are “born-digital” gendered datasets in digital systems experienced as marginalising by those who express their identity beyond the male/female binary? Case Study: Ireland. To answer this universal question, this paper presents the findings of an empirical case study of people in Ireland with diverse gender identities and expressions, and their experiences with public data systems and new technologies. In spite of great social changes in Ireland which have led to constitutional change in favour of LGBTQI + people, born-digital systems were experienced by respondents as embodying socio-cultural values which were no longer accepted in society at large. For many of the respondents, digital technologies routinely marginalise them in all kinds of ways. These systems keep alive violence and oppression long after civil rights have been enshrined in constitutional law. This study is just one example of the way assumptions about digital are disengaged from society-at-large. It is a call to arms to all who are passionate about socially-responsible technology. (shrink)

Evidence from visual-search experiments is discussed that indicates that there is spatially parallel encoding based on three-dimensional (3-D) spatial relations between complex image features. In one paradigm, subjects had to detect an odd part of cube-like figures, formed by grouping of corner junctions. Performance with cube-like figures was unaffected by the number of corner junctions present, though performance was affected when the corners did not configure into a cube. It is suggested from the data that junctions can be grouped to (...) form 3-D shapes in a spatially parallel manner. Further, performance with cube-like figures was more robust to noncollinearity between junctions than was performance when junctions grouped to form two-dimensional planes. In the second paradigm, subjects searched for targets defined by their size. Performance was affected by a size illusion, induced by linear-perspective cues from local background neighbourhoods. Search was made more efficient when the size illusion was consistent with the real size difference between targets and nontargets, and it was made less efficient when the size illusion was inconsistent with the real size difference. This last result occurred even though search was little affected by the display size in a control condition. We suggest that early, parallel visual processes are influenced by 3-D spatial relations between visual elements, that grouping based on 3-D spatial relations is relatively robust to noncollinearity between junctions, and that, at least in some circumstances, 3-D relations dominate those coded in two-dimensions. (shrink)

Gray's integration of the different levels of description and explanation in his theory is problematic: The introduction of consciousness into his theorising consists of the mind-brain identity assumption, which tells us nothing new. There need not be correlations between levels of description. Gray's account does not extend beyond “brute” correlation. Integration must be achieved in a principled, mutually constraining way.