Can a machine be racist? Artificial Intelligence has shown troubling signs of bias, but there are reasons for optimism
- Written by Charles Barbour, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Western Sydney University
One day in mid-2013, four people, including two police officers and a social worker, arrived unannounced at the home of Chicago resident Robert McDaniel.
McDaniel had only ever had minor run-ins with the law – street gambling, marijuana possession, nothing even remotely violent. But his visitors informed him that a computer program had determined that the person living at his address was unusually likely to be involved in a future shooting.
Perhaps he would be the perpetrator, perhaps the victim. The computer wasn’t sure. But due to something called “predictive policing”, the social worker and the police would be visiting him on a regular basis.
Review: More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech – Meredith Broussard (MIT Press)
Professor Meredith Broussard.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Reforming AI
This brings us to Broussard’s no-nonsense approach and her optimism regarding the possibility of changing the systems she describes.
It is undeniably hard not to be overwhelmed by the seemingly unstoppable course of technological development in the contemporary world, especially around AI and everything it appears poised to reinvent. But cynicism can also be a hiding place for privilege, and those who say despairingly that nothing can be done are often those who stand to benefit most from nothing being done.
With this in mind, Broussard is keen to distinguish between “imaginary” or “general AI” and “real” or “narrow AI”.
The former is “the AI that will take over the world, the so-called singularity where robots become uncontrollable and irreversible – killer robots – and so on”. This, she says, is not real. “Real AI, which we have and use every day,” is nothing more than “math”.
AI, in other words, is not magical. It is a sophisticated pattern-detection machine. And while it might be able to detect “patterns that humans can’t easily see”, and thus function as a kind of “black box”, that does not mean that it is “impossible to describe”.
For the same reason, Broussard is confident that humans can and should treat AI like a tool. Ultimately, she thinks, it is nothing more than a reflection of those who use it. If it is biased, that is only because it is the product of a biased society. And it will change precisely insofar as society changes.
Tech, Broussard concludes,
is racist and sexist and ableist because the world is so. Computers just reflect the existing reality and suggest that things will stay the same – they predict the status quo. By adopting a more critical view of technology, and by being choosier about the tech we allow into our lives and our society, we can employ technology to stop reproducing the world as it is, and get closer to a world that is truly more just.
One Question
This is the only place I would be inclined to ask a question. For while Broussard’s political agenda is unimpeachable, her approach to technology does seem rather humanist and instrumental.
For a very long time now, science and technology scholars – Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler and Bruno Latour, to name just a few – have been suggesting that, as much as we make and use technologies, technologies also make and use us.
The question of how humans will get AI under our control, or how we will guide it towards our ethical and political ends, is quite distinct from the question of how the same technology will transform what it means to be human and how we live in relation to each other and our worlds.
Neither line of inquiry should be considered superior. But it is hard to imagine pursuing one very far without at least encountering the other. A richer conversation between the approach represented by Broussard, and the approach represented by those of us in the tradition of figures like Harraway, Kittler and Latour, would seem to be in order.
Authors: Charles Barbour, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Western Sydney University 
