Safiya Noble
Noble touches on how our ideas of sexism racism bleed into the technology world in ways we can hardly imagine, namely through search engines. Because the programming for software is often built from user inputs, search results for any given topic will bring up what is most often searched for. In the case of race, oftentimes searches for beautiful people will yield images of white people, or searches for criminals will yield images of black people. Autocompletes for searches about women will show a number of sexist remarks, such as women can’t drive, etc. Despite how small and insignificant things like this seem, they reinforce prejudiced attitudes on a grand yet subtle scale. Personally, I am unsurprised by this, but I find it annoying how no one seems to be interested in considering this an issue, much less attempt to solve it.
Ruha Benjamin
Benjamin goes into this idea of discriminatory design, or (usually software) design that will put marginalized peoples at a disadvantaged position in regards to how we read data, and how our machines learn from us. The problem with machine learning is that it’ll correlate racial traits to varying levels of credit, trustworthiness, etc. Given that race is largely made up of social construct, the inefficiency of tech companies to address these issues of technological inequality feeds into a sort of “Jim Code”. I feel like this talk really opens up what Noble was saying earlier, and provides an argument about why digital bigotry impacts society beyond just making people feel bad.
Lisa Nakamura
Nakamura starts by talking about the failings of technology in recent years to have the consumer’s best interests in mind, and suggests that the way to resolve this is via VR. VR has this ability to physically put you in the position of others in an immersive way, which some believe will increase overall empathy. I don’t think I agree with this very much. I’m reminded of Jane Elliot’s eye color experiments – wherein she took a class full of third-graders in the 60s and taught them about discrimination by expressing prejudice to either brown-eyed kids or blue-eyed kids. While this was highly effective, she did a similar study with college students, and found they weren’t nearly as receptive, especially white people. I feel like VR or not, the older you get, the harder it’s gonna be to get out of your worldview and empathize.