Yarden Katz

You see a title that says Artificial Whiteness and you think here is a whole new angle to artificial intelligence (AI) I know nothing about. It will be a great read and change my outlook. But you, and I, would be wrong. With all the reasons to hate and fear AI, racism remains the very least of it. Politics is a yawn, and ideology comes with the customer.

Yarden Katz is a systems biologist at Harvard. His book tries very hard to be about racism, but it fails. The closest he comes is a bookcover criticizing the Japanese for stealing AI intellectual property. It portrays the Statue of Liberty with a female Japanese face, and a robot arm holding the torch.

He tries very hard to link AI labs at universities with the universities’ nefarious investments overseas, particularly agricultural ones. American universities like to buy up land hand it over to agribusiness, cutting out locals. But by this measure, absolutely everything done by or at these universities could be slammed, including Katz himself for taking their money. But AI? Just more roadkill.

The book gets a little more into reality when Katz criticizes the major uses of AI so far – surveillance and policing. These are traditionally racist functions, and predictive policing systems pretty much automatically target black neighborhoods. They prejudice police work even more than it already is.

Staying with the justice system, there is also algorithmic sentencing that tells judges how long to send people away, as well as risk assessment. They are all part of the same disease, and AI is boosting them. He calls AI’s contribution carcerial-positive logic.

But that is really the only concrete example he has. Does that make AI white?

AI is nebulous and amorphous. It was born without a definition and has been bouncing off the bumpers ever since. The military cottoned on to it because of the word intelligence, pouring millions upon millions of dollars into it annually, hoping for some brilliant new advantage for itself. But again, this is nothing new. The military has always poured untold millions into the academic research world as well as private labs. It has given America an unfair advantage it refuses to permit any other country to employ. But white?

He says the precepts and framework of AI research are epistemic forgeries. But forgeries implies there is a different, true way that AI is mimicking illegally. But there’s no evidence of that in the book. AI is stumbling from discovery to discovery just like every new technology before it. So far, not much works. But phone systems are getting “better”, driverless vehicles are almost ready for prime time, and autonomous drones are in the air. Data mining and facial recognition are odious and imperfect, but “improving”. None of those are great for mankind or the planet. But white?

His view is that “AI has drawn on epistemic forgeries to pass as universal what in fact constitutes a white, elite and masculinized perspective. And AI is often presented with overtly racial and gendered imagery, alongside colonialist narratives.” But no words of proof elaborate on any of this.

He also really doesn’t like the marketing of AI. He is enormously critical of proponents talking about “colonizing” space and other planets, as well as having “slaves” in the form of robots that will ease everyone’s burden. This is evidence of whiteness to Katz.

It turns out that Katz has a different interpretation of white. When he can’t show true racism beyond the Japanese Liberty lady, he adds imperialist and capitalist to his cause. Ever the extreme leftist, he says everything AI does is to further imperial and capital aggressions by the USA. Yes. True. But then, who is the customer paying for all this? How could anyone be shocked that imperialism and capitalism are beefing up on AI innovations? Google did not buy Deep Mind as a playground for frisky engineers. It is making a further fortune off the military. Welcome to the real world.

Halfway through, I had given up on any real proof of concept in the book. But Katz kept insisting he had proven his claims earlier in the book, and so was entitled to move on from there. Which was infuriating. Artificial Whiteness gave me nothing to cite, nothing to change my mind, and nothing to add to my views on race.

He goes off on tangents trying to present rationales (epistemic forgeries?) of his own, using papers from other scientists in other disciplines. The goal is to develop an AI framework that isn’t white. Nothing comes of it.

One last try: “Whiteness gets its significance, and its changing shape, only from the need to maintain the relations of power. AI reproduces this quality of whiteness.”

Nope.

David Wineberg… (mehr)