The Radical AI Podcast Love, Challenge, and Hope: Building a Movement to Dismantle the New Jim Code with Ruha Benjamin
May 6, 2020
Dr. Ruha Benjamin, an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton and founder of the Just Data Lab, delves into how racism is embedded in technology. She discusses the spectrum of discriminatory design, highlighting alarming examples like biased healthcare algorithms. Ruha emphasizes the collective responsibility for algorithmic harms and the importance of connecting with tech-justice groups. She advocates for love as a guiding ethic in technology while suggesting that low-tech solutions can often provide better outcomes than high-tech fixes.
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Episode notes
Racism Beyond Intent
- Racism can be structural and unintentional, not only individual malice.
- Technologies that ignore history and context can produce racially disparate effects.
Soap Dispensers To Harmful Health Algorithms
- Ruha uses the soap-dispenser video to show how biased sensors exclude darker-skinned users.
- She contrasts this low-stakes example with a healthcare algorithm that ignored Black patients by using cost as a proxy for need.
Neutral Algorithms Produce Biased Outcomes
- Race-neutral algorithms can still produce biased outcomes when proxies reflect unequal treatment.
- Using healthcare spending as a predictor of need excluded many Black patients from proactive care.
