11 Race Against the Machine

It would be irresponsible to discuss artificial intelligence (AI) without touching on the enormous concern about deep-machine-learning projects reinforcing racial stereotypes and structural inequality. These concerns are magnified by the speed and ubiquity with which AI is spreading through communities and organizations, and by the way industry is marketing it as a thinking tool. Unconscious consumption could jeopardize social justice efforts and reinforce harmful racial bias. In her book, Algorithms of Oppression, Noble (2018) cautions that the material impacts of AI are legion:

Artificial intelligence miserably mispredicted future criminal activity and led to the overincarceration of Black defendants… big data are [also] directly implicated in the financial and housing crisis of 2008 (which, incidentally, destroyed more African American wealth than any other event in the United States). (p. 27)

In their 2021 Artificial Intelligence Index, Stanford University reported that across the U.S. only 2.4% of AI PhDs were African American (p. 144). Their 2023 report focuses on Computer Science PhDs instead of AI, but African Americans still only represent 4.05% of that specialized field (p. 310). Although these statistics are not fully representative, AI is a highly-competitive field, and a PhD is commonly listed as a requirement for machine learning research positions. The report further cautions, “The lack of diversity in race and ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation not only risks creating an uneven distribution of power in the workforce, but also, equally important, reinforces existing inequalities generated by AI systems” (Stanford, 2021, p. 3). Representation within the AI community is absolutely essential to minimize tremendous material harm to the African American community.

The African American community has spent centuries “reconstructing their own image and countering negative stereotypes…yet a conception of Blackness… that remains to this day [is] circumscribed by White normative meanings” (Au et al, 2016, p. 113). AI presents additional obstacles to their community’s self-determination when they must fight not only against the man, but also the machine for accurate representation.