Artificial Intelligence: Making AI in our Images - Savage Mind

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Sally Applin

Hello! I’m Sally Applin. I am a technology anthropologist who examines automation, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of preserving human agency. My dissertation focused on small independent fringe new technology makers in Silicon Valley, what they are making, and most critically, how the adoption of the outcomes of their efforts impact society and culture locally, and/or globally. I’m currently spending the summer in a corporate AI Research Group where I contribute to anthropological research on AI. I’m thrilled to blog for the renowned Savage Minds this month and hope many of you find value in my contributions.

Bias, AI, Gender Bias, Sexism, Racism, Women in ScienceBrigitte BellanSeptember 10, 2017Sally Applin, Anthroplogy, Savage Minds

Why we desperately need women to design AI - Medium

At the moment, only about 12–15% of the engineers who are building the internet and its software are women.

Here are a couple examples that illustrate why this is such a big a problem:

Do you remember when Apple released it’s health app a few years ago? Its purpose was to offer a ‘comprehensive’ access point to health information and data. But it left out a large health issue that almost all women deal with, and then took a year to fix that hole.
Then there was that frustrated middle school-aged girl who enjoyed gaming, but couldn’t find an avatar she related to. So she analyzed 50 popular games and found that 98% of them had male avatars (mostly free!), and only 46% of them had female avatars (mostly available for a charge!). Even more askew when you consider that almost half of gamers are women.

We don’t want a repeat of these kinds of situations. And we’ve been working to address this at Women 2.0 for over a decade. We think a lot about how diversity — or lack thereof. We think about it has affected — and is going to affect — the technology outputs that enter our lives. These technologoies engage with us. The determine our behaviors, thought processes, buying patterns, world views… you name it. This is part of the reason we recently launched Lane, a recruitment platform for female technologists.