Whiteness of AI erases people of colour from our ’imagined futures’, researchers argue

The overwhelming 'Whiteness' of artificial intelligence - from stock images and cinematic robots to the dialects of virtual assistants - removes people of colour from the way humanity thinks about its technology-enhanced future. If the developer demographic does not diversify, AI stands to exacerbate racial inequality Kanta Dihal This is according to experts at the University of Cambridge, who suggest that current portrayals and stereotypes about AI risk creating a "racially homogenous" workforce of aspiring technologists, building machines with bias baked into their algorithms. They say that cultural depictions of AI as White need to be challenged, as they do not offer a "post-racial" future but rather one from which people of colour are simply erased. The researchers, from Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) , say that AI, like other science fiction tropes, has always reflected the racial thinking in our society. They argue that there is a long tradition of crude racial stereotypes when it comes to extraterrestrials - from the "orientalised" alien of Ming the Merciless to the Caribbean caricature of Jar Jar Binks. But artificial intelligence is portrayed as White because, unlike species from other planets, AI has attributes used to "justify colonialism and segregation" in the past: superior intelligence, professionalism and power. "Given that society has, for centuries, promoted the association of intelligence with White Europeans, it is to be expected that when this culture is asked to imagine an intelligent machine it imagines a White machine," said Dr Kanta Dihal, who leads CFI's ' Decolonising AI ' initiative.