This is how these bosses get rich: by hiding underpaid, unrecognised human work behind the trappings of technology, says the writer and artist James Bridle.
By James Bridle for The Guardian on April 10, 2024
Since 2021, thousands of Amazon and Google tech workers have been organising against Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s shared USD$1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military. Since then, there has been no response from management or executive. Their organising efforts have accelerated since 7 October 2023, with the ongoing genocide on Gaza and occupied Palestinian territories by the Israeli state.
Continue reading “Tech workers demand Google and Amazon to stop their complicity in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people”
The pioneering AI researcher and activist shares her personal journey in a new book, and explains her concerns about today’s AI systems.
By Joy Buolamwini and Melissa Heikkilä for MIT Technology Review on October 29, 2023
In its online series of digital dilemmas, Al Jazeera takes a look at AI in relation to social inequities. Loyal readers of this newsletter will recognise many of the examples they touch on, like how Stable Diffusion exacerbates and amplifies racial and gender disparities or the Dutch childcare benefits scandal.
Continue reading “Al Jazeera asks: Can AI eliminate human bias or does it perpetuate it?”
No technology has seemingly steam-rolled through every industry and over every community the way artificial intelligence (AI) has in the past decade. Many speak of the inevitable crisis that AI will bring. Others sing its praises as a new Messiah that will save us from the ails of society. What the public and mainstream media hardly ever discuss is that AI is a technology that takes its cues from humans. Any present or future harms caused by AI are a direct result of deliberate human decisions, with companies prioritizing record profits, in an attempt to concentrate power by convincing the world that technology is the only solution to societal problems.
By Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli for Just Tech on September 6, 2023
If this title feels like a deja-vu it is because you most likely have, in fact, seen this before (perhaps even in our newsletter). It was back in 2015 that the controversy first arose when Google released image recognition software that kept mislabelling Black people as gorillas (read here and here).
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Image recognition is still not capable of differentiating gorillas from Black people”
Eight years after a controversy over Black people being mislabeled as gorillas by image analysis software — and despite big advances in computer vision — tech giants still fear repeating the mistake.
By Kashmir Hill and Nico Grant for The New York Times on May 22, 2023
One of the classic examples of how AI systems can reinforce social injustice is Amazon’s A.I. hiring tool. In 2014, Amazon built an ´A.I. powered´ tool to assess resumes and recommend the top candidates that would go on to be interviewed. However, the tool turned out to be very biased, systematically preferring men over women.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: How hiring tools can be sexist and racist”
In Wired, Chris Gilliard strings together an incisive account of the racist history of surveillance: from the invention of home security system to modern day surveillance devices and technologies, such as Amazon and Google’s suite of security products.
Continue reading “Intentional or otherwise, surveillance systems serve existing power structures”
Surveillance systems, no matter the intention, will always exist to serve power.
By Chris Gilliard for WIRED on November 14, 2021
Behind the promise of automation, advances of machine learning and AI, often paraded by tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Tesla, lies a deeply exploitative industry of cheap, human labour. In an excerpt published on Rest of the World from his forthcoming book, “Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism,” Phil Jones illustrates how the hidden labour of automation is outsourced to marginalised, racialised and disenfranchised populations within the Global North, as well as in the Global South.
Continue reading “Big Tech is propped up by a globally exploited workforce”
Chris Gilliard grew up with racist policing in Detroit. He sees a new form of oppression in the tech we use every day.
By Chris Gilliard and Will Oremus for Washington Post on September 17, 2021
Big tech relies on the victims of economic collapse.
By Phil Jones for Rest of World on September 22, 2021
The Plug and Fast Company looked at what happened to the 3.8 billion dollars that US-based tech companies committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion as their response to the Black Lives Matter protests.
Continue reading “Tech companies poured 3.8 billion USD into racial justice, but to what avail?”
Surveillance expert Chris Gilliard reflects on 2020’s racial justice protests, the hypocrisy of tech companies’ commitments, and where we are one year later.
By Chris Gilliard and Katharine Schwab for Fast Company on June 16, 2021
From Siri, to Alexa, to Google Now, voice-based virtual assistants have increasingly become ubiquitous in our daily lives. So, it is unsurprising that yet another AI technology – speech recognition systems – has been reported to be biased against black people.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Speech recognition systems by major tech companies are biased”
An already infamous example of racist technology is Amazon’s facial recognition system ‘Rekognition’ that had an enormous racial and gender bias. Researcher and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League Joy Buolawini (the ‘poet of code‘), together with Deborah Raji, meticulously reconstructed how accurate Rekognition was in identifying different types of faces. Buolawini and Raji’s study has been extremely consequencial in laying bare the racism and sexism in these facial recognition systems and was featured in the popular Coded Bias documentary.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Amazon’s racist facial ‘Rekognition’”
In 1965, IBM launched the most ambitious attempt ever to diversify a tech company. The industry still needs to learn the lessons of that failure.
By Charlton McIlwain for Logic on December 20, 2021
The left must vie for control over the algorithms, data, and infrastructure that shape our lives.
By Meredith Whittaker and Nantina Vgontzas for The Nation on January 29, 2021
Emails show that the LAPD repeatedly asked camera owners for footage during the demonstrations, raising First Amendment concerns.
By Sam Biddle for The Intercept on February 16, 2021
Technology has never been colorblind. It’s time to abolish notions of “universal” users of software.
From The Internet Health Report 2020 on January 1, 2021
Zoals de dood van George Floyd leidde tot wereldwijde protesten, zo deed de vooringenomen beeldverwerkingstechnologie PULSE dat in de wetenschappelijke wereld. Er werd opgeroepen tot een verbod, maar neuro-informaticus Sennay Ghebreab vraagt zich af of een digitale beeldenstorm het probleem oplost.
By Sennay Ghebreab for Vrij Nederland on October 5, 2020
Critics say it merely techwashes injustice.
By Annie Gilbertson for The Markup on August 20, 2020
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