Phase 1, Post 10: AI and Oppression

Algorithms of Oppression, while dated, demonstrates Google's disregard for bias prevention.  My midterm project is on how NLP can open up perpetuation of demographic biases, and the examples drawn from the book are directly related to this.  Today's discrimination can take on a more insidious form, less and less lunging to tear down and more and more hiding behind systemizing the us/them mentality.  This is the type of discrimination brought up in Algorithms of Oppression.  Google never outright states that women of color are sexual objects but is certainly ready to direct you to HotBlackPussy.com upon a keyword search "black girls" (Safiya 3).

One of the Google Talk's proposed solutions that came up fairly often was diversifying their team.  While this is a good idea generally, it brought up a lot of notions that did not sit well with me.  The most obvious of which is the fact that the need to diversify your team indicates there isn't already diversity in the team.  Google is one of the largest tech titans to date and somehow still struggles to hire people from marginalized groups.  The other and arguably more damaging notion is that bringing in diversity is a catch-all solve to social issues.  It is odd to call a practice you should already be implementing a solution.

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