Batya Friedman

Batya Friedman is an American professor in the University of Washington Information School. She is also an adjunct professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and adjunct professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, where she directs the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab.She received her PhD in learning sciences from the University of California, Berkeley School of Education in 1988, and has an undergraduate degree from Berkeley in computer science and mathematics.

Quotes

• We’re fast and furious with these technologies that are at a scale and power that’s beyond our current moral capacities, I think right now we have a really great mismatch between the power of our tools and our wisdom to use them well.
• Human values don’t exist in isolation, It’s not like there’s privacy over here, and trust over there, and security there.
• At the time, if you did any search on values and computing or anything related to that, you would come up with nothing. It just was not on people’s radars
• I wanted to do my work from within computing. I wanted to do it as an insider, not as an outside critic, to provide leadership for the field.
• Maybe there are things in 20 or 50 years that you’re going to want to know about the present, so you need to collect them now, The people who start the work are not going to be the people who finish the work.
• I feel a great sense of satisfaction, Others are taking these ideas, theoretical constructs, methods, and practices — applying and extending them in their own ways and own contexts. And that’s when you know you’ve contributed to shifts in the world.
• My scholarly and technical work is about creating the conditions to make the world a better place — a place for human flourishing and for a flourishing planet, My art is about beauty and form — in effect, creating the peace that I hope we will all experience when we arrive there.
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