It’s been a few weeks since 18,000 people gathered at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
I attended with a focus on learning more about what technologists are doing in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Personally, I’m interested in A.I. and how it applies to my work as an Information Architect and how chatbots and content recommendation engines can help my users more easily and naturally find what they are looking for. I’m interested in IoT as it applies to my newbie-level work on e-textiles.
With so many impressions and ideas tucked into my head, I left the conference inspired and yet tongue-tied. I knew that something profound needed to be teased out, but what?
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How can it be that representative voices of this conference about women in computing — one rising to the top for the first 24 hours and one rising to the top a year later — are not the voices of women?
As a woman of color, I’m not shocked, as I see an endlesss queue of folks who don’t know my experience, put into positions of being the dominant voices speaking about and around my experience, whether they like it or not.
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My dad believes that A.I. will be benevolent and can’t possibly do harm because it will be like Data on Star Trek and just know to how to do the right thing.
As A.I. moves closer and closer to the heart of our lives, we must consider the words of Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) at Grace Hopper 2017:
“There is nothing artificial about A.I.”
A.I. does not spring to life on its own as pure, objective, god-like technology. Human beings with biases, conscious and otherwise, are the ones putting the “intelligence” into A.I. by designing and coding algorithms and by contributing data to models that are crowdsourced, as with the Google Translate example above.
In other words, A.I. can only be as intelligent, or dumb, as we are.
My technologist hero Jaron Lanier speaks of the myth of A.I. and how a dangerous echo chamber created when the following factors exist:
The root data is bad.
We blindly trust A.I. to do the right thing.
The user interfaces surfacing the data don’t allow us to question or point out flaws in the data.
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The lack of diversity in tech is not just about fair and equal treatment in the workplace, it is also about a much larger crisis: fair and equal treatment in the digital and virtual worlds being built all around us.
As the analog world continues to fade and the virtual world comes more and more to the forefront of our lives, are we going to correct the errors and biases built into the analog world or are we going to bake these travesties in all over again?
I was blown away by the work Chieko Asakawa shared at Grace Hopper around her use of technology of help blind people be more independent and navigate the world.
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We will miss out on one of the biggest opportunities in the history of the civilization to fix the most fundamental and profound wrongs in how we inhabit this world.
Imagine the end of gender- and race-based profiling and discrimination and where humanity can go without these limitations perpetrated by flawed stereotypes and data.
Imagine a world in which we are truly seen and valued for who are are and are treated according to our actual behaviors, not on what we are artificially predicted to do or want.
Imagine a world in which technology promises to make the world a better place and actually succeeds in doing so, not just for a narrow demographic, but for everyone.
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Source: Hackernoon