Cs and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial intelligence and The Unconscious Baises

Cs and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial intelligence and The Unconscious Baises 

Hello, readers! I am Divya Parmar and I warmly welcome you all to read my blog. This is blog is response to the thinking activity upon Cs and Feminism - Cyberfeminism: Artificial intelligence and The Unconscious Baises. It is given by Dr. Dilip barad sir. In this blog I will write my reading upon Cyberfeminism and interpretation of videos by Kriti Sharma and Robin Hauser. 

Cyberfeminism: Artificial intelligence and The Unconscious Biases 

Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. The foundational catalyst for the formation of cyberfeminist thought is attributed to Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", third wave feminism, post-structuralist feminism, riot grrrl culture and the feminist critique of the alleged erasure of women within discussions of technology. 

Cyberfeminism is a sort of alliance that wants to defy any sort of boundaries of identity and definition and rather be truly postmodern in its potential for radical openness. This is seen with the 1997 Old Boys Network's 100 anti-theses which lists the 100 ways "cyberfeminism is not. Cornelia Sollfrank from the Old Boys Network states that: 

Cyberfeminism is a myth. A myth is a story of unidentifiable origin, or of different origins. A myth is based on one central story which is retold over and over in different variations. A myth denies one history as well as one truth, and implies a search for truth in the spaces, in the differences between the different stories. Speaking about Cyberfeminism as a myth, is not intended to mystify it, it simply indicates that Cyberfeminism only exists in plural. 

a label for women—especially young women who might not even want to align with feminism's history—not just to consume new technologies but to actively participate in their making;

a critical engagement with new technologies and their entanglement with power structures and systemic oppression.

The dominant cyberfeminist perspective takes a utopian view of cyberspace and the Internet as a means of freedom from social constructs such as gender, sex difference and race. For instance, a description of the concept described it as a struggle to be aware of the impact of new technologies on the lives of women as well as the so-called insidious gendering of technoculture in everyday life. It also sees technology as a means to link the body with machines. This is demonstrated in the way cyberfeminism—as maintained by theorists such as Barbara Kennedy—is said to define a specific cyborgian consciousness concept, which denotes a way of thinking that breaks down binary and oppositional discourses. There is also the case of the renegotiation of the artificial intelligence (AI), which is considered top-down masculinist, into bottom-up feminized version labeled as ALife programming.

Video : 1 How to keep human bias out of Artificial intelligence? 

In this video, the speaker talked about AI - (Artificial intelligence) . She started her talk with a question: How many decisions about you have been made by artificial intelligence? And how many of them are based on your gender, race or background?

 So as we know technology working on code or algorithms. Algorithms are always used to make decisions about who we are and what we want but AI makes decisions on which show we watch more and what we update on our Facebook account. 

Now everything is decided by algorithms like how we pay our car insurance, what products we should use or whether you get that job interview or how good your credit score is. But fact is that these all decisions are being filtered through its assumption about our identity, race, gender or age. 

1- We can be aware of our own biases and machines around us.

2- We can make sure that diverse teams are building these technologies.

3- We have to give it diverse experience to learn from it.

According to the speaker when you work with technology and you don't look or work like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk then your ability must be questioned, and then she gave an example - when she logged in herself and put her photo then she got comments like , ' What makes you think you are qualified to talk about AI? , What makes you know - you know about the machine and then she wears a different style of clothes and uses a name which doesn't reflect her identity and then she didn't get any such comments and was able to work on it.

So to make AI better - we should call people from all backgrounds who can write and tell the stories and help to create the personalities of AI. people who can solve the problem - people who face different challenges and people who tell us what is a real issue we need to fix. When people from different backgrounds come together then use of technology might be limitless. Less racist Roberts, less machines that are going to take our jobs and more about what technology can achieve.

Video : 2 Robin Hauser: Can we Protect AI our Biases? 

In this video speaker talked about the nature of biases in human and in machines too, as she told that biassed are unconscious and sometimes it's necessary because it is survival techniques but our unconscious lead us to make biassed decisions and assumptions, and AI don't able to remove it by themselves in fact in many circumstances AI is as biassed as human nature. But in today's time computer scientists and Al company leaders are aware about that and working to find a solution but it doesn't seem to be an easy fact. Human shapes the all the program and if we make AI as human then very soon we lose the control from Al. 

So in both the videos the speaker mostly talked about human nature as biassed and coding which is set by humans according to their nature and both the videos are solution oriented in which they talked about how we could make better AI for the future and can control biassed systems. Today, feminist activists are claiming that digital rights are human rights, too. When cyberfeminists are saying that digital rights are human rights, they are creating subversive solutions and alternative realities. They are building the human rights framework with a digital perspective and the digital architecture that we need for the future that we desire. 

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