Safiya Noble – Algorithms of Oppression (talk, 45m)
Safiya talks about how algorithms have been secretly been built in a more biased fashion. This has been proven time and time again – as Safiya discusses – through simple things like google searches. The example that really stood out to me was that of the “three black teenagers” and the “three white teenagers”. The first search was almost entirely mug shots of people of color, but the second search was mostly made up of candid photos of white people playing sports or something. The example of the “professional hairstyles” was equally as strong. What was even crazier to me was that google tried to cover it up by changing the algorithm by the next day.
Why do you think google allows things like this to happen? Why would they not try to make searches to do with race (maybe more specifically in image searches though) more equally represented?
Ruha Benjamin – Race
After Technology (talk,
20m)
Ruha argues that racism is productive – and not always in the negative sense, but most often is. She too talks about how algorithms can be racist by looking at a specific example where an algorithm chose white patients over black ones even though the algorithm wasn’t inherently ‘racist’. Instead, the algorithm looked at cost to predict healthcare needs, but black people on average “incur fewer costs for a variety of reasons”.
Do you think it’s possible for algorithms to be created without racial bias – I ask this because we have an example of an algorithm that didn’t even take race into account, but still ended up making race-based decisions. Do you think things like this will continue to occur in the future through easy fixes? Or will we probably encounter this problem for a long time?
Lisa Nakamura – Laboring Infrastructures (talk, 30m)
Lisa talks a lot about VR and empathy – and how VR is not empathetic. It often puts a white audience into a different racial experience – often in a way to bring awareness to something going on in our world. Yet, while this audience might be affected due to the VR experience, it doesn’t always mean that anything will happen because of that. She also talks about the idea of being in someone else’s shoes; she says that being in someone else’s shoes means you’ve taken those shoes.
I’ve been dealing with VR in my Interaction II class: do you feel that VR in general is something that should be pursued and used in this method? Or are there other effective ways to get our points across?