To coincide with her new book More than a Glitch (2023, MIT Press), we’re excited to host Meredith Broussard for a talk on “Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech” on 10th May 2023.
The talk is co-organised by the King’s College London Centre for Digital Culture, Digital Futures Institute, Department for Digital Humanities and Race Equality Network.
You can read further details and register here. An excerpt from the event blurb is copied below.
What if racism, sexism, and ableism aren’t just glitches in mostly functional machinery—what if they’re coded into our technological systems? In this talk, data scientist and journalist Meredith Broussard explores why neutrality in tech is a myth and how algorithms can be held accountable.
Broussard, one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.
Broussard argues that the solution isn’t to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. She explores practical strategies to detect when technology reinforces inequality, and offers ideas for redesigning our systems to create a more equitable world.