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

by Joy Buolamwini

After the NYC meeting, I had a few meetings in the IBM Boston office. The team let me know that they had developed a new model and wanted me to share the results at the conference. I insisted that I would have to test their new model at my office, so they took the trip to the Media Lab and met me right around the corner from the Foodcam. Their dress clothes gave corporate vibes as they walked past the ping-pong table in the atrium. Sitting next to my LEGOs, surrounded by grad school artifacts and the white mask, the IBM team members shared their model with me. The numbers did in fact look significantly better than the older model. One of the computer vision team members put his hands together in a prayer pose and looked me dead in the eyes. “Please share the updated results.” I understood the look in his eyes. His reputation was on the line. Just as there are people whose lives are impacted by the labels and classifications that machine learning systems put out, there are people on the other side of the equation whose careers and livelihoods are linked to the products I was scrutinizing. Before my visits to the IBM offices, the developers of these commercial systems were as faceless to me as the users who are impacted by these systems might have been to them. They were in some ways “just” doing their job in the ways they had been trained to do. But when just doing your job can mean someone else’s life chances are at stake, there has to be a higher standard. Doing your job ...