Community Defense: Sarah T. Hamid on Abolishing Carceral Technologies

amarashar's bookmarks 2020-09-02

Summary:

It’s not due to a lack of imagination that these scholarly communities have continuously circled the drain on questions such as the presence of racial bias in particular systems—this is a political arrangement. It’s a structural condition of how the grants that fund their work are allocated, and the relationships they have to industry and to government institutions. For decades, research questions have been staged to these scholarly communities in very particular ways by carceral institutions. There is a given-ness to the problems that these researchers are failing to interrogate. For instance, it's no accident that for years everyone was like, “We need explainable AI,” and then DARPA started handing out millions of dollars worth of grants to develop explainable AI. Historically, certain academic disciplines have had moments when they decided to reexamine their relationship with the military and police industrial complex. Consider anthropologists refusing to participate in the US military’s human terrain systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance. But the ethics-in-technology communities haven’t had that kind of reckoning yet, where they start to deeply interrogate why they're asking the questions that they're asking. Because these technologies are moving so quickly, I think people in these research communities haven't had a chance to reflect on why they keep asking the questions that they're asking. Where do the questions come from? And why is it that they’re asking the exact same questions that DARPA is asking? And why isn't that entanglement ethically complicated for them?

Link:

https://logicmag.io/care/community-defense-sarah-t-hamid-on-abolishing-carceral-technologies/

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Ethics/Gov of AI » amarashar's bookmarks

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Date tagged:

09/02/2020, 11:34

Date published:

09/02/2020, 07:34