More library books today. Freshly acquired from the Seattle Public Library I have in my hands Safiya U. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
I’ve intended to read it for a long time, but, confession: I read a lot for work in news (especially evaluating claims), short pieces, and research. I rarely reserve any energy for book-length discussions about topics I consider myself conversant or expert in, or at least the core ideas.
Why it’s interesting
There aren’t a lot of books about the racism and bias encoded in technology though, so this was a natural compliment to the new-to-me authors by Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X. Kendi I was reading.
Why we care
This book has been around for going on three years, which is a long time to sit on my reading list. George Floyd’s murder by police last year caused me to reprioritize my reading list in favor of racial justice and history. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
In that same time, it’s come to my attention there are lots of people who work on ML and AI have been outspoken about being “anti-woke.” Pretending there’s any such thing as culture-agnostic science and technology is about as fundamental a failure of understanding of the technologies I can imagine, working as I do with NLP and language models at the core of my design and research work.
I’ve become a little anxious I’ll soon enough have to have a discussion on the topic within professional relationships, so I thought this might be useful. I’ll let you know once I read it!
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