Episode 24: AI Won't Solve Structural Inequality (feat. Kerry McInerney & Eleanor Drage), January 8 2024
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New year, same Bullshit Mountain. Alex and Emily are joined by feminist technosolutionism critics Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney to tear down the ways AI is proposed as a solution to structural inequality, including racism, ableism, and sexism -- and why this hype can occlude the need for more meaningful changes in institutions.

Dr. Eleanor Drage) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Dr. Kerry McInerney) is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute. Together they host The Good Robot), a podcast about gender, feminism, and whether technology can be "good" in either outcomes or processes.Watch the video version of this episode on PeerTube).

References:

HireVue promo: How Innovative Hiring Technology Nurtures Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)

Algorithm Watch: The [German Federal Asylum Agency]'s controversial dialect recognition software: new languages and an EU pilot project)

Want to see how AI might be processing video of your face during a job interview? Play with React App), a tool that Eleanor helped develop to critique AI-powered video interview tools and the 'personality insights' they offer.

Philosophy & Technology: Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference”) (Drage & McInerney, 2022)

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: Copies without an original: the performativity of biometric bordering technologies) (Drage & Frabetti, 2023)

Fresh AI Hell

Internet of Shit 2.0: a "smart" bidet)

Fake AI “students” enrolled at Michigan University)

Synthetic images destroy online crochet groups)

“AI” for teacher performance feedback)

Palette cleanser: “Stochastic parrot” is the American Dialect Society’s AI-related word of the year for 2023)!

You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute).Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown).

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Alex

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Music by Toby Menon.Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park). Production by Christie Taylor.