Overview

Dramatic statements about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence for humanity abound, as an industry of experts claims that AI is poised to reshape nearly every sphere of life. Who profits from the idea that the age of AI has arrived? Why do ideas of AI's transformative potential keep reappearing in social and political discourse, and how are they linked to broader political agendas? Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. He demonstrates that understandings of AI, as a field and a technology, have shifted dramatically over time based on the needs of its funders and the professional class that formed around it. From its origins in the Cold War military-industrial complex through its present-day Silicon Valley proselytizers and eager policy analysts, AI has never been simply a technical project enabled by larger data and better computing. Drawing on intimate familiarity with the field and its practices, Katz instead asks us to see how AI reinforces models of knowledge that assume white male superiority and an imperialist worldview. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force. Bringing together theories of whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a deep understanding of the history and practice of science and computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.

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9780231194914

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Reviews

In Artificial Whiteness, Yarden Katz takes a deep dive into the history of artificial intelligence in order to reveal its enduring connections not only to the military-industrial complex, but to white supremacy itself. Katz sounds a chilling warning about how amorphous and future-oriented domains of knowledge production like AI -perhaps especially when abetted by the modern university's false claims to both neutrality and benevolence -are able to be hidden from public scrutiny while they produce inequality, violence, and catastrophe in our world. A unique and fascinating study. -- Britt Rusert, author of <i>Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture</i> In this timely, compelling, persuasive, and eye-opening book, Yarden Katz makes profound contributions to knowledge at the intersections of technology, philosophy, and critical race theory. Artificial Whiteness exposes Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a malleable technology of power rooted in raced, classed, and gendered models of the self. Katz reveals how the artifice of whiteness provides the organizing logic of AI and enables its racist and capitalist ideological projects to be disguised as socially neutral technological imperatives. -- George Lipsitz, author of <i>The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics</i>

Author Information

Yarden Katz is a fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT in 2014.

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