Ruha Benjamin

It's just trying to dream up what is possible other than what we have.

I really appreciate all of the prison abolitionists, Mariam Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, all of these people who have done so much work because It really is just a different way of thinking about how you live in the world rather than an end result.

I love that answer.

And I would agree for me, being in the community has really helped me learn more about myself.

Yeah.

One of my favorite books, favorite academic authors, author in general, but I don't know if y'all have heard of Ruha Benjamin.

She wrote the book Race After Technology.

And so it's this book that kind of goes through very similarly that... as we are building more technology, people are saying it's unbiased, but when you're creating things, and she uses so many different examples, but the one that's coming to mind is this beauty tracker that was made in China.

It makes so much sense to gather data on us and be able to preempt our needs, therefore, by knowing where I'm going to be and what my patterns are and how I use the city.

And then I went to see a sociologist called Ruha Benjamin, and she gave the most amazing keynote at this urbanism conference.

And it was a really bold thing for this conference to put her on because she is like so anti tech and AI and really just wheeled through this incredible argument talking about this idea of you know all these things that are coded what are these coded ideas when we talk about intelligence when we talk about cities like whose intelligence are we talking about and she made such an amazing persuasive case that actually things like the robo dog it's like an agent of racism you know in border camps and the US border when you've got a robo dog patrolling it's not a neutral thing and actually technology can't ever be considered neutral when the people creating technology and maintaining technology are are humans and we in ourselves are like absolutely impossible and incapable of impartiality.

Like it's just not a human thing.

What conversation at NOMA changed the way you think?

One, the keynote speaker, Dr. Ruha Benjamin.

She talked about innovation.

and really about the way we look at innovation and trying to twist, you know, is innovation really going to Mars or innovation creating the next sustainable house solution? And so that really like changed my idea of like, I love technology, I love STEM, but it really changed my idea of like, okay, how do I use this technology into really creating a more positive and better future? Especially with like here, where this year I'm listening to more about the vernacular of architecture and really trying to like understand how maybe technology can play into vernacular, how maybe where can we boost and create a more positive future, really.

When we talk about AI completely generating text, we have to be very careful with that.

And one of the reasons why I think we need to be very careful with that, I'm gonna share my screen real quick if that's okay with you, 'cause, uh, there's this thing called Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin in her book Race After Technology, and Jim Code is a specific manifestation of discriminatory design in which racist values and assumptions are built into our technological systems.

So we see this when there's, uh, studies that fi- that find potential risk with self-driving cars, that they also notice darker-skinned pedestrians because they didn't train the data on dark-skinned people.

Then AI algorithms are making decisions about healthcare, which may only worsen medical racism, choosing to not provide, uh, resources to people that are Black.