Episode 24: AI Won't Solve Structural Inequality (feat. Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage), January 8 2024
Description
New year, same Bullshit Mountain. Alex and Emily are joined by feminist technosolutionism critics Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney to tear down the ways AI is proposed as a solution to structural inequality, including racism, ableism, and sexism -- and why this hype can occlude the need for more meaningful changes in institutions.
Dr. Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Dr. Kerry McInerney is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute. Together they host The Good Robot, a podcast about gender, feminism, and whether technology can be "good" in either outcomes or processes.
Watch the video version of this episode on PeerTube.
References:
HireVue promo: How Innovative Hiring Technology Nurtures Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Algorithm Watch: The [German Federal Asylum Agency]'s controversial dialect recognition software: new languages and an EU pilot project
Want to see how AI might be processing video of your face during a job interview? Play with React App, a tool that Eleanor helped develop to critique AI-powered video interview tools and the 'personality insights' they offer.
Philosophy & Technology: Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference” (Drage & McInerney, 2022)
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: Copies without an original: the performativity of biometric bordering technologies (Drage & Frabetti, 2023)
Fresh AI Hell
Internet of Shit 2.0: a "smart" bidet
Fake AI “students” enrolled at Michigan University
Synthetic images destroy online crochet groups
“AI” for teacher performance feedback
Palette cleanser: “Stochastic parrot” is the American Dialect Society’s AI-related word of the year for 2023!
You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.
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Emily
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Alex
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.