Tech is from Mars and Values from Venus
Can the planets realign for better tech and purpose-driven outcomes?
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Philip
As a child, I was once posed the following riddle:
A father and son are involved in a road accident and the father is killed instantly. The son is rushed to a hospital and into surgery. The surgeon stops suddenly and says, “I cannot operate on this boy because he is my son.” How is this possible?
This riddle operates by exposing an unconscious bias many in our society hold, which is to first assume doctors are male. I have asked others this riddle and been astonished watching as men and women alike perform mental gymnastics trying to figure out the solution. It’s a same-sex couple! Was the father actually his godfather? Of course, some people get it right away.
The first time I was asked to solve this puzzle, the answer was so simple to me that I assumed I must have misunderstood the premise. My mother is a doctor who brought science and medicine into my life from a young age, which is why the solution seemed so obvious that it hardly felt like a riddle at all. If it’s still not clear what the answer is — the surgeon was the boy’s mother.
Searching for the above image on Unsplash using the term ‘surgeon’ revealed the same gender bias with an overwhelming number of pictures of male surgeons and only one female
Throughout her career, my mother has often been the sole woman in a research lab, in a boardroom, on a stage, or on the byline of a scientific paper she has published. In recent years, she has spoken with me about her increasingly bold and courageous acts of protest to speak out and fight against gender-based discrimination in academia and science where she works.
I thought of my mother while listening to a recent interview with leading AI scientist, Dr. Fei Fi Li on the podcast, On With Kara Swisher. Dr. Li is world-renowned for her role in the creation and development of ImageNet, a large-scale visual database that has played a pivotal role in advancing deep learning and computer vision research. Among many other accolades and responsibilities, she currently holds the position of Co-Director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and is also the co-founder of the nonprofit, AI4ALL, whose mission is to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education. Dr. Li is a model for the kind of technologist-ethicist we need leading us into the AI age, and I highly encourage readers to seek out her commentary.
Both Dr. Ashe (aka mom) and Dr. Li have contributed landmark scientific breakthroughs in their respective fields, all while breaking through barriers to do it. In the podcast episode, Kara Swisher, herself a standard bearer for women in journalism, laments the paucity of women in technology, and all but gives up on things ever changing. Swisher’s pessimism must come, at least in part, from her perspective covering technology that has evolved at such a spectacular pace, while the culture creating it largely stagnates. The contrast must be as frustrating as it is stark.
While Dr. Li is more optimistic than Swisher, they are equally dissatisfied with the status quo. In the interview, she draws a line from Ada Lovelace, widely considered to be the world’s first computer programmer who worked on an early mechanical computer in the mid-19th century, to herself. She acknowledges that while a lot of progress has taken place, we still have a long way to go. Dr. Li’s work as one of the co-founders of the nonprofit AI4ALL is a manifestation of these values in action, but both of these tech luminaries recognized the scale of the inequity and the looming potential of its consequences.
Technology created by homogenous teams operating in systems organized around profit-making has caused a lot of harm in the world. From biased hiring or carceral system software to the cultural carcinogens released by social media platforms, it is readily apparent we must do better, especially with technology as powerful as AI. And because the status quo is highly incentivized with fame and fortune for the mostly-male leaders of big tech companies, the impetus for change may need to come from elsewhere.
While listening to their discussion, it occurred to me that if the nonprofit sector were to proactively and vigorously engage with AI, to take a leading role at the pivotal moment of its global inception, it would constitute a de facto large-scale infusion of female perspective and power into a persistently male-dominated arena, at a particularly opportune moment when AI policy is literally being written.
In 2016, the U.S. nonprofit sector accounted for 12.3 million workers, 73% of whom are women. Close to 10 million women work in the nonprofit sector, nearly twice as many people as work in the entire technology sector, which employed 5.2 million people in 2020. Talk about strength in numbers.
Advocacy and storytelling are second nature for most nonprofit workers, and the sector as a whole is interlaced with organizing structures like associations and formal and informal community networks. Such assets are the primordial elements of a cohesive movement that could have enough power to shape AI policy in crucial ways including to push for more gender equity and diversity of values within tech, and to improve the ways technology is deployed throughout society.
Thankfully, for decades, a vast contingent of innovators have been developing cutting-edge systems for exactly this purpose. The time has come for the mostly-female nonprofit sector unveil the latest in human-centric and purpose-driven operating models for the mostly-male tech sector to learn from.
I am not trying to pit Mars against Venus, rather, I’m simply noting things are best, by far, here in the middle on Earth. The riddle at the beginning of this piece illustrates the absurdity of mental models constrained by bias. They are unhelpful and can cause us to overlook even the most obvious aspects of reality.
As I’ve written in previous pieces, the age of artificial intelligence will be defined by this existential challenge — to imbue the all-powerful machines of tomorrow, with humanity’s greatest wisdom and highest values, today. The innovators of silicon and algorithms must find a way to work with the innovators of justice and sustainability. AI, unlike any technology before it, demands the best of us, from all of us.
Thanks for reading this edition of The Process. Please share and comment or you can email me at philip.deng@grantable.co
Philip Deng is the CEO of Grantable, a company building AI-powered grant writing software to empower mission-driven organizations to access grant funding they deserve.