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I’d always wanted to shape-shift my body like Ananse the spider, the clever trickster who appeared in stories my Ghanaian father and mother told me while I was growing up.
Soft pillows, manicure sets, and ambient lighting accented my fellow revelers, who were reclining with beauty masks seeping into their faces. The masks didn’t fit my facial features, but at least I was out of the lab.
This was one of the best parts of being a coder, and an artist: the thrill of being in the middle of creating something delightful. It’s like the anticipation of eating freshly baked bread after its aroma fills the room.
Like many coders, I do not build everything from scratch—I rely on preexisting code, called software libraries, to create new systems. Think of it like a home improvement project. If I want to build a fence, I don’t need to personally chop down trees for my posts. I can go to the hardware store and buy prefabricated items, like precut planks of wood that fit my vision. Software libraries are lines of code written by other coders, like prefabricated building blocks, and they can be downloaded online by almost anyone.
I looked around my office and saw the white mask that I’d brought to Cindy’s the previous night. As I held it over my face, a box appeared on the laptop screen. The box signaled that my masked face was detected. I took the mask off, and as my dark-skinned human face came into view, the detection box disappeared. The software did not “see” me.
the coded gaze describes the ways in which the priorities, preferences, and prejudices of those who have the power to shape technology can propagate harm, such as discrimination and erasure. We can encode prejudice into technology even if it is not intentional.
In fact, the coded gaze extends beyond race and gender. The deeper into my research I got, the more I understood how profound and sweeping the coded gaze’s impact is. It encompasses myriad ways technology can manifest harmful discrimination that expands beyond racism and sexism, including ableism, ageism, colorism, and more.
I was finally in a place where I could explore my creative impulses and build technology without being bogged down by everyday concerns, let alone geopolitical issues well beyond my experience. At the time, I viewed tech critics as necessary nuisances. I knew they served an important role, but I felt they were distant from the struggles and joys of technological innovation.
rankled
I couldn’t help but think of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. The book, written almost a half century before my experience, interrogates the complexities of conforming oneself—putting on a mask to fit the norms or expectations of a dominant culture. After striving for years to gain entrance to this epicenter of innovation, MIT, I was reminded that I was still an outsider. I left my office feeling invisible.
Generative AI products are only one manifestation of AI. Predictive AI systems are already used to determine who gets a mortgage, who gets hired, who gets admitted to college, and who gets medical treatment—but products like ChatGPT have brought AI to new levels of public engagement and awareness.
The fake image of Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket that circulated online in 2023 signaled more than AI amusement.[5] Associating the head of the Catholic Church with a fashion trend is only a few keystrokes away from generating an image that could incite religious violence.
On what would have been an otherwise uneventful spring day, Jennifer DeStefano picked up her phone and heard the pleading sobs of her daughter. “Mom, these bad men have me. Help me!” The caller demanded a ransom for the safe return of her daughter. Thankfully, Jennifer was able to confirm the location of her daughter shortly after the kidnapping hoax call.[7]
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 cannot say we are advocating for disability rights and create AI-powered tools that erase the existence of people who are differently abled by adopting ableist design patterns. We cannot claim to respect privacy rights and then have our school systems adopt AI-powered surveillance systems that reduce children to data to be sorted, tracked, and reprimanded for deviating from the algorithmic standard.
We swap fallible human gatekeepers for machines that are also flawed but assumed to be objective. And when machines fail, the people who often have the least resources and most limited access to power structures are those who have to experience the worst outcomes.
As Dr. Rumman Chowdhury reminds us in her work on AI accountability, the moral outsourcing of hard decisions to machines does not solve the underlying social dilemmas.
the option to say no, the option to halt a project, the option to admit to the creation of dangerous and harmful though well-intentioned tools must always be on the table.
AI reflects both the aspirations and the limitations of its makers.
as an engineer more eager to work with machines than with people at times,
ails
I hope when you feel despair you return to the stories of triumphs I share.
Prestige and privilege masquerade as merit though much of what is achieved is a function of what we inherit.
My parents taught me that the unknown was an invitation to learn, not a menacing dimension to avoid.
my mother would sometimes bring me back down to earth with a gentle “Why has a long tail…”
my parents wouldn’t let me watch commercials: They wanted to shield me from the materialism that appeared to be the backbone of American culture. “You will never find your worth in things,” they cautioned.
She sat next to a robot she had built named Kismet, a dazzling and intricate web of metal and wires topped off with enchanting eyes, animated ears, and a cheeky smile. The moment I saw the machine appear to come to life, I was mesmerized.
I discovered different kinds of programming languages. I started by learning the basics of HTML and CSS to build a website. These programming languages focused on structure and formatting.
I learned another programming language called Java. Here, I was introduced to the concept of an algorithm. An algorithm, at its most basic definition, is a sequence of instructions used to achieve a specific goal.
talk shop,
On a tour of the campus prior to accepting MIT’s offer, I remember talking to a professor who told me, “If what you are thinking of making already exists, go elsewhere.”
vanguard
“Take a class that builds your skills, take a class that deepens your knowledge, and take a class that is just for fun.”
The software libraries I incorporated were not optimized for people like me with darker skin. I had encountered these issues when I was an undergraduate, face-to-face with Autom in Hong Kong, and here they were again. Despite all the developments in AI over those intervening years, the problem had still not been fixed.
It was one thing if I could not paint a wall with my smile, but if someone was misidentified as a criminal suspect and falsely arrested or worse, then the stakes were unmistakably high.
The white mask episode had been disheartening, but I didn’t want people to think I was making everything about race, nor being ungrateful for rare and hard-won opportunities. Speaking up had consequences.
demurred.
gadfly
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 wanted to believe that technology could be apolitical.
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.
There was no doubt in my mind that I was qualified, and I didn’t want people to assume that I got opportunities only because of my race and gender. At the end of the day, it was a matter of personal pride. The more I grew, the more I could recognize the privileged educational opportunities I had at a young age, when I visited art galleries and science labs. My exposure to science and technology was the exception, and exceptionalism would not change the overall fabric of society. Exceptionalism also carried the danger of tokenism, which allowed systemic issues to be ignored by pointing to a few
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Author Cathy O’Neil was in town to talk about her latest book, Weapons of Math Destruction.
“How would someone without a smartphone be able to benefit from what you are proposing?”
Promise Tracker tool that was deployed in Brazil and had been used in many communities. The tool enabled novices to create community surveys and take photos to document whether public services were being delivered. So if an elected official claimed to have put money toward improving school lunches, students could document the quality of lunches they were receiving—or if they received any lunch at all—using the Promise Tracker tool. The technology was never the main point, but it was a starting point to help shift power and resources.
To execute a beautiful vault, you had to look beyond the bar and rise above it to the sky. Switching your mindset from bar gazing to star gazing allows your body to follow a more expansive vision. The older graduate students at MIT who had offered me their advice were bar gazing in their attempt to finish. I still had time. I wanted to star gaze.
futon
Being combative was easier than being vulnerable.
as someone who would always have many interests, I would have to figure out what should remain side projects.
Now, at the Media Lab, I was no longer focused on teaching novices how to code, as I had been when I was a Fulbright fellow. I was daring to recode artificial intelligence.
