What Will It Take to Decolonize Artificial Intelligence?
By Robin Donovan,
NEO.LIFE
| 06. 16. 2022
There’s a joke in Silicon Valley about how AI was developed: Privileged coders were building machine learning algorithms to replace their own doting parents with apps that deliver their meals, drive them to work, automate their shopping, manage their schedules, and tuck them in at bedtime.
As whimsical as that may sound, AI-driven services often target a demographic that mirrors its creators: white, male workers with little time and more disposable income than they know what to do with. “People living in very different circumstances have very different needs and wants that may or may not be helped by this technology,” says Kanta Dihal at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in England. She is an expert in an emerging effort to decolonize AI by promoting an intersectional definition of intelligent machines that is created for and relevant to a diverse population. Such a shift requires not only diversifying Silicon Valley, but the understanding of AI’s potential, who it stands to help, and how people want to be helped.
Biased algorithms have made headlines in... see more
Related Articles
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 06.22.2022
Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash
In October 2019, Jordan Janz became the first person in the world to receive an experimental therapy for cystinosis, a rare genetic disease. The treatment was physically grueling. Doctors extracted blood stem cells from Janz’s...
By Ian Sample , The Guardian | 06.22.2022
More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey.
Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll...
By Fiorella Valdesolo, WSJ Magazine | 06.08.2022
“Where is the we?” It’s the question that was the driving force for Vida Delrahim and Ronit Menashe when they created WeNatal, a new brand of prenatal supplements that aims to be more inclusive. In the process of trying...
By Michael Le Page, New Scientist | 06.16.2022
CRISPR gene-editing trials for treating sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia are being extended to include children aged under 12 after the therapies proved successful in ongoing trials involving people aged between 12 and 35. The aim is to treat...