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When engineers make racially insensitive mistakes, it doesn’t always mean they are racists

WE ARE TOLD OF LATE THAT WE MUST entertain whether technology can be a racist. Like when Google Photos, in 2015, algorithmically identified black people as gorillas. Or earlier this year when Microsoft’s Twitterbot Tay, de- signed to emulate human conversation by trawling tweets, sucked up racist nonsense along with everything else and started spouting some of its own. Or when, in August, Snapchat offered a selfie-altering filter that rendered users as an offensive Asian caricature.

Of course these things should not, once noticed, stay as they are. (All of the examples above were altered or taken down.) But are they racist—i.e., evidence that contempt for racial mi- norities is the warp and woof of our society still?

The fact that we are trained to ap- proach such things from that perspec-

tive calls for some words from James Baldwin, someone few consider to have ever gotten much wrong on race. Here he is in 1962: “I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief pas- sage on this planet.”

To Baldwin, the issue was getting rid of segregation and police brutality, not cleansing whites’ hearts of all rac- ist sentiment, which blacks of his gen- eration considered beside the point, not to mention impossible. I suspect many today concur—Baldwin’s quote is very Black Lives Matter—but too often we get our heads turned in unproduc- tive directions. This leads to an obses- sion not with racism as an obstacle to achievement, but with racism as a

‘CHANGING MINDS REQUIRES COMPASSION AND UNDERSTANDING, NOT DISDAIN.’ —PAGE 26

SOCIETY

Is technology capable of being racist? By John McWhorter

I L LUS T R AT ION BY SH A N NON W R IGH T F OR T I M E

24 TIME September 12–19, 2016

VERBATIM

‘We do not support so-called trigger warnings,

we do not cancel invited

speakers because their topics might prove

controversial, and we do not condone the creation of

intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where

individuals can retreat

from ideas and perspectives at odds with

their own.’ JOHN ELLISON,

dean of students at the University of Chicago, pushing back against recent college trends in a letter to incoming

freshmen

The View

social stain to rub out; it’s like trying to shame peo- ple who don’t recycle or floss.

Machines cannot, themselves, be racists. Even equipped with artificial intelligence, they have nei- ther brains nor intention. The question worth ask- ing is whether the people who created a given tech- nology qualify as racists. We can dismiss the idea that wonks dreaming up these mechanisms deliber- ately intend to offend people. No one at Google gig- gled while intentionally programming its software to mislabel black people. Microsoft’s engineers were horrified by their Frankenstein Twitterbot.

All three of these flubs were just that, uninten- tional outcomes that their creators were quick to regret and correct. For example, should we expect these creators to have anticipated that software that codes gorillas as black in color, and perhaps having fullish lips, might apply the same label to black peo- ple? They may well have assumed that the recogni- tion software was programmed richly enough to recognize specifically human traits that they needed not worry about this. To instead take the occasion to flay Silicon Valley for not hiring enough black peo- ple is hasty: Can we really be certain that a design team with more black programmers would not have made the same flub?

Tay’s programmers, meanwhile, would hardly be alone in underestimating the degree of vicious idiocy on Twitter, and may have assumed that Tay’s being asked normal, neutral questions would not have sparked links to noxious vitriol. These were, in a word, bugs. Bugs in programs involved chiefly in labeling and language are bound, at some point, to create offense.

The Snapchat filter stands out. Clearly some- body in creative there is on the clueless side (and Snapchat is one of the tech companies that refuses to report on the racial composition of its staff). However, cluelessness is not bigotry. Eyes like the ones used by Snapchat are legion in anime-derived emojis, for example. A sane person could well as- sume, although perhaps in haste, that such a facelet was within the bounds of decency.

Our culture has gotten to the point that we con- sider it our jobs to say these mistakes indicate “rac- ism,” with the implication that the designers and the people who hire them are therefore “racists.” This disproportionate disgust is a touch medieval in two ways. Imputing bigotry to a computer program is like imputing a spirit to a tree. And calling a Silicon Valley computer programmer a racist is like deem- ing one’s innocent next-door neighbor a witch for being less than perfect. In a healthier moment there would be more room for saying that these people simply made a mistake.

McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University

CHARTOON

Idiomatic dietetic schematic

IT’S EASY FOR ADULTS TO BEMOAN that kids today are growing up typing, not writing. But the typed word is no less intellectual than longhand, argues Anne Trubek in her new book, The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting. Our attachments to handwriting, she explains, are “primarily emotional,” and our associations with intelligence and neat lettering have fluctuated over time—we’ve variously linked bad handwriting with intelligence (think: doctors) and stupidity (teachers have been found to subconsciously give lower grades to papers with worse penmanship). What’s important is not the neatness of our prose but the volume: “If anything, we are in a golden age of writing,” Trubek contends. “Most Americans write hundreds if not thousands more words a day than they did 10 or 20 years ago. We have supplanted much talking and phone calling with texting, emailing and social media.”

—SARAH BEGLEY

BOOK IN BRIEF

The future of handwriting

J O H N AT K I N S O N , W R O N G H A N D S

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