Charlton McIlwain, author of the book Black Software, takes a good hard look at IBM in a longread for Logic magazine.
Continue reading “IBM is failing to increase diversity while successfully producing racist information technologies”Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers
In 2015, when T.J. Fitzpatrick visited a conference in Atlanta, he wasn’t able to use any of the soap dispensers in the bathroom.
Continue reading “Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers”The internet doesn’t have ‘universal’ users
Since 2017, Mozilla – the makers of the Firefox browser – have written a yearly report on the health of the internet. This year’s report focuses on labor rights, transparency and racial justice. The piece about racial justice makes an interesting argument about how the sites we see on the first page of a search engine are a reflection of the general popularity of these sites or their ability to pay for a top result. This leads to a ‘mainstream’ bias.
Continue reading “The internet doesn’t have ‘universal’ users”Google fires AI researcher Timnit Gebru
Google has fired AI researcher and ethicist Timnit Gebru after she wrote an email criticising Google’s policies around diversity while she struggled with her leadership to get a critical paper on AI published. This angered thousands of her former colleagues and academics. They pointed at the unequal treatment that Gebru received as a black woman and they were worried about the integrity of Google’s research.
Continue reading “Google fires AI researcher Timnit Gebru”A year of algorithms behaving badly
The Markup has published an overview of the ways in which algorithms have been given decisional powers in 2020 and have taken a wrong turn.
Continue reading “A year of algorithms behaving badly”