Of all computer science doctorates, only 1.6% were awarded to Black doctoral candidates.
“It’s repulsive to me,” Gebru said. “I honestly think there’s more of a chance that I would go back to Google—I mean, they won’t have me and I won’t have them—than me going to OpenAI.”
It is in this subsection of artificial intelligence, the field of AI ethics, where women in tech have found a measure of success, but their work in the field often puts them at odds with the white men who control the boards and companies in Silicon Valley. Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, an encrypted messaging app, says the problem is really about giving people from diverse backgrounds power to effect change, as opposed to tokenizing their seats at the table.
“We’re not going to solve the issue—that AI is in the hands of concentrated capital at present—by simply hiring more diverse people to fulfill the incentives of concentrated capital,” Whittaker told Wired. “I worry about a discourse that focuses on diversity and then sets folks up in rooms with [expletive] Larry Summers without much power.”
Black people in particular have felt the brunt of the way artificial intelligence is used by the police, for example.
As BLACK ENTERPRISE previously reported, the city of Detroit was sued by a Black woman who was arrested while eight months pregnant because officers used a facial recognition program to tie her to the crime. And, this is just one of many similar incidents.
In a November article for Esquire, Mitchell S. Jackson surmises that this is inescapable as the field of criminal justice insists on pushing to use artificial intelligence, even though the datasets those programs will use are filled with negative biases that will inevitably work against Black people.
Jackson writes, “AI in policing is being implemented into that already flawed system. It’s more dangerous to Black and brown people because the persistent lack of diversity in the STEM fields—from which AI comes—is apt to generate more built-in biases against people of color, the same people who are overpoliced and underprotected.”
He continued, “AI in policing is hella dangerous to my people because it operates on data—crime reports, arrest records, license plates, images—that is itself steeped in biases.”
Calvin Lawrence, the author of “Hidden In White Sight,” a book examining how artificial intelligence contributes to systemic racism, spoke to CNN about how the biases in AI are also a product of a lack of access. Lawrence explained that in order to get more Black people into the field, you have to at least present it as a path they can take.
“You certainly don’t have a lot of Black folks or data scientists participating in the process of deploying and designing AI solutions,” Lawrence said. “The only way you can get them to have seats at the table, you have to educate them.”
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Source: Black Enterprise
