Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

by Joy Buolamwini

Given the real harms of AI, how can we center the lives of everyday people, and especially those at the margins, when we consider the design and deployment of AI? Can we make room for the best of what AI has to offer while also resisting its perils? None of us can escape the impact of the coded gaze. Instead, we must face it. You have a place in this conversation and in the decisions that impact your daily life, which are increasingly being shaped by advancing technology that sits under the wide—often opaque—umbrella of artificial intelligence. This book offers a path into urgent and growing conversations about the future of technology that need your voice, the voice of everyday people with lived experiences of what it means to be excluded—indeed, excoded—from systems not designed with you in mind. We need the voice of people like Robert Williams, who was wrongfully arrested in front of his children due to a false facial recognition match.[8] We need the voice of students, those struggling with e-proctoring software that flags them as cheaters.[9] We need the voice of migrants from Haiti and Africa who were caught in limbo when applying for asylum because the U.S. government required use of a mobile app that failed to verify their faces.[10] We also need the voice of the unseen faces that do the ghost work, the data cleaning, the human translation that supports AI products. We need the voice of the parents whose children had intimate moments recorded by listening devices m...