Week 5: Reading Response - kalibirdsall/Creative-Coding-Class-Wiki GitHub Wiki

Reading Response. "Algorithms of Oppression" by Safiya Umoja Noble, (introduction, p5 1-15):

This author wants to "make sense of the consequences of automated decision making through algorithms in society". A really important take away from this reading is that algorithms are not neutral or unbiased products. Algorithms are created and controlled by humans who possess a wide range of biases, and inevitably, these biases are present in the algorithms and in any product a human makes. The author states that "part of the challenge of understanding algorithmic oppression is to understand that mathematical formulations to drive automated decisions are made by human beings." Its easy to think that a subject that seems so factually based like math is totally neutral, but even math can be distorted by human biases.

The author also details the shocking sexism and racism in Google search results. For example, when searching on Google for "black girls" (in 2010) the first search result returned was for pornography. She also gives multiple examples of overtly racist search results that came up during the Obama presidency.

She points out that Google Search is "an advertising company, not a reliable information company", and we should ask ourselves whether the Google search results are really the "best information" out there, and we should question who the results are really intended for.

The implications are profound when "racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology", "because information organizations, from libraries to schools and universities to governmental agencies, are increasingly reliant on or being displaced by a variety of web-based “tools” as if there are no political, social, or economic consequences of doing so." And the author also notes that "it is of no collective social benefit to organize information resources on the web through processes that solidify inequality and marginalization— on that point I am hopeful many people will agree."

While I've heard about biases in search results before, I hadn't considered how that was really happening, and how the algorithms had human biases built into them in such a precise way, so this article was really insightful.