Naming: reflect their assimilation and political struggles
anglicize names
Black Power movement took Arabic / African names
anglicize names don't celebrate difference (unlike in other culture)
"normal" name -> reinforce racial invisibility
names have predictive value
New Jim Code: technology fix often hide, speed up, deepen discrimination
"Google's algorithms were optimizing for the racially discriminating patterns of past users who had clicked on these ads, learning the racist preferences of some users and feeding them back to everyone else"
Who to blame?
tech designers who encode judgments into technical systems? (subjective)
Facebook's "Move Fast and Break Things." -> "What about the people and places broken in the process"
NTech Lab's Facenet
This is a business model in which more traffic equals more profit, even if that traffic involves violently crashing into other users
Is Diversity, Inc. (specialized product for minority) good? (see Black History month)
What do "free will" and "autonomy" mean in a world in which algorithms are tracking, predicting, and persuading us at every turn? (p31)
race critical code study.
"What I call the anti-Black box links the race-neutral technologies that encode inequity to the race-neutral laws and policies that serve as powerful tools for White supremacy." (p35)
Race, to be sure, is one of our most powerful tools - developed over hundreds of years, varying across time and place, codified in law and refined through cusfom, and, tragically, still considered by many people to reflect immutable differences between groups. (p36)
"[o]n the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" (changed by technology)
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Technological determinism is a theory saying that human social activities are largely determined by the technology the society has. Therefore, there exists some corollary to the theory. Firstly, the technological development is a standalone process that can't be speed up nor slowed down. Secondly, the advancement of technology can eventually solve social issues.
Is technology develop independent to the development of society? My answer is: clearly no. You might think that development of natural science can hardly be impacted by the society because its development is greatly depending on the tools we use to conduct experiments. From our daily observation, the development of such tools take time and not everyone can be as great as Einstein. However, modern technologies are funded by culture, specifically economy and therefore human needs. Consider some observations: When people needed to win a war, air planes and tanks were invented. And as the excerpt argues: people who are designing the technology has the power to influence how a technology can affect the society. Therefore, technology is greatly influenced by the society. Or is it? Can we reduce the relationship between technology and society to be a simple, one directional, causal relationship? I doubt so.
The technology mentioned in the articles about artificial intelligence is mealy a statistical tool that still requires large datasets, unnesscaryly complex architecture, and fine-turning of hyperparameters. AI, as of today, is far from
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PVf9VjMp9E p5.js: based on java script processing: based on java (hardware)
Examples:
Traces – physical programming with folding shapes
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