Beep boop robots are coming for your Black Asses 🤖
Welcome to the 45th installment of This Black-Ass Life. This week we’re talking about AI, why it’s racist and what we can do about it. We also discuss Jermaine Dupri, make you a summer Afrobeat playlist and introduce a new section of the newsletter.
Don’t forget: We've managed to grow this list thanks to y'all forwarding to friends so please keep it up! Forward this link to subscribe to five friends. And send us topics you'd like to see covered, texts from your Black-ass people, and any Black-ass anything from around the world and web.
l. The Facts
Artificial Intelligence, the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior, is racist as fuck because the humans who help create the AI systems are racist, or at least biased, as fuck.
How it works: Machine-generated algorithmic systems sift through millions of data and make connections and predictions about everything from facial and speech recognition to chatbots.
When creating AI, the (mostly White and male) designers have to make choices, including what data to include and train it on, what questions are needed to have the algorithm function and how to use the answers that the algorithm produces.
If designers do not have a deeper understanding of their own biases and structural racism, the AI will pick up on said biases.
The issue is so concerning that congressional Democrats have proposed a bill that would require large companies to determine whether the algorithms they’re creating are resulting in discrimination before unleashing them on us.
Why does it matter?
“We can’t afford to have a tech that is run by an exclusive and homogenous group creating technology that impacts us all. We need more experts about people, like human psychology, behavior and history. AI needs more unlikely people.” - Rachel Thomas
Corporations and governments are now using AI systems to help determine hirings, firings, prison sentences, loan approvals, among many other things. When it comes to facial recognition particularly, we’ve already seen how dangerous and wrong AI can be for people with darker complexion:
AI systems are significantly better at identifying pedestrians with lighter skin tones – a White person was 10% more likely to be identified as an actual person than a Black person.
Google’s image-recognition system failed to differentiate between Black people and gorillas.
AI facial recognition systems sold by IBM, Microsoft and Amazon got the faces of White men correct 99% of the time, but couldn’t tell the difference between Oprah, Michelle Obama and Serena Williams.
Again, this is all especially scary since facial recognition is already or about to be used in the criminal justice systems to find suspects, to predict criminality, to help self-driving cars determine humans, monitor people at airports, etc.
Considering all of the above, this is not the worst thing ever, but racist-ass hand dryers that refuse to let us dry our damn hands is also mad annoying.
What can tech companies do?
Hire Black people and/or audiences representative of the groups you’re targeting. If there’s not a representative set of perspectives in the room, you will create biased systems.
Factor in technical care and social awareness when framing issues, collecting data and building algorithms.
What can you do?
Read this on the danger of being overly reliant on data because “that impulse often overshadows necessary critical thinking to ensure that the information provided isn't tainted by issues of confirmation, pattern or other cognitive biases.”
Check out the Algorithmic Justice League. Founder, Joy Buolamwini with the knowledge: “Data centric technologies are vulnerable to bias and abuse. As a result, we must demand more transparency and accountability. We have entered the age of automation overconfident yet underprepared. If we fail to make an ethical and inclusive AI, we risk losing gains made in civil rights and gender equity under the guise of machine neutrality.”
ll. Other Things
Hot girls up; Jermaine Dupri down.
If we can’t go to Bella Noches … take a look at #ThrowblackTwitter.
Ari Lennox, Jada Pinkett Smith and more jump on Jermaine Durpi’s comments on women in rap. More.
Loved this read: How Trina’s sex-positive bars have inspired women for over two decades.
Congratulations to Myles and Precious Brady Davis on their pregnancy!
Serena pledged to fight inequality to the grave.
We may get a Black woman 007.
Joycelyn Savage’s parents confronted R Kelly’s publicist.
Remember how enabling and in-the-know R Kelly’s staffers were in that Lifetime docu-series? Ex staffers handed over 20 tapes of R Kelly to the feds.
Love After Lockup Report.
The best show on T.V. We have some questions though.
Why would Clint take Tracie to Vegas as her first trip after 10 years of incarceration and parole?
What else could Lizzie take from Scott?
When will we address Sarah’s blaccent?
How will we save Megan? She’s too good for this!
Our Black-Ass song(s) of the week (Jumoke):
Summer is the absolute best time for new afrobeat releases. Lots of great songs out, but I highly recommend this one (watch the video). Here's my top favorite afrobeat/alte songs of Summer 2019 if you want to jump right in.
Things we are looking forward to / things we are not looking forward to:
I (Jumoke) look forward to whatever Beyonce is cooking up with afrobeat producers. Gimme, gimme!
I (Mitu) look forward to whatever Beyoncé was filming at the Grand Canyon and reading the greatest Twitter thread of all time that came from it.
lll. A Black-Ass Dream
Please Mariah hop on the remix.
Stay Black, thrive, and giddy up or giddy out our way. We’ll hit your inbox next on July 29.