( neuro - sighing - fits )

Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology  has been circulating as a must-read for those wanting to learn more about how racism is encoded into everyday tech. But it's not for those who are looking for simple tips on how to de-bias data, or wishing to find distinct boundaries between ethical and non-ethical technology. Rather, this book is about the connections between overtly racist technology and that which is touted as "social good", how racism shapes scientific thinking and vice versa, and how race and racism itself is an invented technology born from the scientific practice of classifying the things within our world. It is not a book that reveals answers for fixing tech, but instead reveals racist logic behind its development and marketing, and challenges the reader to question whether certain tech, broken or not, is good at all. Below are some of my notes on the book's main sections. Section 1: Engineered Inequity   "Intention" seems to be the most fr...

As I continue to learn more about critical AI and STS, the views I have on my own work, and my personal and professional goals, have changed. My recent posts focus on that, while most of my earlier posts were created while trying to break out of a seemingly unsustainable academic situation, and were meant to demonstrate to employers that I can work with data outside of a neurophysiology lab. I did not think about the implications of using internet data for pain research, for example, in the way I do now. As such, some of the earlier posts do not necessarily reflect how I would approach the same problems today. I have left them up because it's part of my journey, and they serve as an example of how someone in tech who thinks their thought processes are innocuous, may not necessarily be so.