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

by Joy Buolamwini

I had gotten into computer science in some ways to escape the messiness of the multiheaded -isms of racism, sexism, classism, and more. I was acutely aware of discrimination in my own life. I just wanted to embrace the joy of coding and build futuristic technologies, or even real-world applications that focused on health, without needing to be bothered with taking down -isms. I also did not want to become a nuisance. Though all signs indicated otherwise, I wanted to believe that technology could be apolitical. And I hoped that if I could keep viewing technology and my work as apolitical, I would not have to act or speak up in ways that could put me at risk. Plus, I thought focusing on these ever-present factors too much would make me bitter and rob me of the jovial spirit that had driven me to optimistically pursue male-dominated fields. Work hard enough, I believed, and you could transcend the -isms or at least minimize them to a point where your life trajectory wasn’t significantly altered by their gravity. There must be some truth to meritocracy. Hadn’t I made it to MIT? I wanted to hold on to that fiction instead of facing the harsher realities.