A.I. Is Not as Advanced as You Might Think
It starts with the systems it was built off of
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My name is Mutale and I am an expert in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Governance. This is my area of expertise, yet every time I say it, it sounds strange to me. That’s mainly because I’m one of the few black women in this space. And although I would prefer to work behind the scenes, I still walk into too many rooms where people do not believe machines can be racist for me to stand on the sidelines. These interactions can be really difficult and I still do not know how to handle the discomfort. But what’s the alternative?
Artificial intelligence is changing everything from how we are selected for jobs to whether or not we are given bank loans. A recent McKinsey report found A.I. technologies have the potential to add somewhere between $3.5 and $5.8 trillion to the U.S. economy, across 19 industries, through the collection and monetization of our data. This is incredibly exciting but it also worries me. A.I. systems cannot read social context, yet they are being developed to meet the needs of all humanity.
My question: who is behind the scenes creating this wealth? A quick look at the Google A.I. research website provides some insight: it lists 893 people working on “machine intelligence.” Only one is a black woman — yes, I said one — the number before two and after zero.
The same is true of Facebook, which lists 146 people on its A.I. Research Team yet none are black — not one. It all makes sense when you realize how many black women are getting PhDs in Computer Science. A study by the Computing Research Association found that four black women graduated with a PhD in Computer Science in 2014. The future is here y’all and it’s pretty vanilla.
My career was launched through the Data & Society Fellowship and supported by the good people at A.I. Ethics Twitter. Being one of the first means my work has been featured heavily in the press. I have spoken at universities throughout the United States and will be going to Germany to deliver a keynote next month. However, I cannot and do not want to be the only one.
