But the technology of the Nikon Coolpix and the HP Pavilion masks a more modern, and more insidious, racism: it’s not that their designers set out to create a racist machine, or that it was ever employed for racial profiling; rather, it seems likely that these machines reveal the systemic inequalities still present within today’s technological workforce, where those developing and testing the systems are still predominately white. (As of 2009, Hewlett-Packard’s American workforce was 6.74 per cent black.)16 It also reveals, as never before, the historic prejudices deeply encoded in our data
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