Feminist Intelligence

Abstract

In September 2015, BBC ran an interactive quiz titled “Will a robot take your job?” Part of a longer series of articles, videos, and interactive content analyzing what the news outlet termed the “revolutionary” nature of AI and robotics in the 21st century, occupations ranging from actor to tax expert were classified by percentage of risk for human obsolescence. Such fears that technology will lead to an inevitable decline in employment opportunities parallel the development of technologies meant to replace human workers since at least as early as the industrial revolution. There is no doubt that such technologies have a socially and historically significant impact on the nature of work and employment. Following the industrial revolution, the “robot revolution,” smart infrastructures, and software enabling the sharing economy are part of a future that seems to be driven by Moore’s law (Gordon Moore’s 1965 prediction that “computing would dramatically increase in power, and decrease in relative cost, at an exponential pace”) and concerns the automation of all spheres of human life, ranging from production and service to care. Beyond the sphere of labor, artificial intelligence also has profound impacts on social relations, determining how we move through space, how we are surveilled, who owns our data, etc. Moreover, artificial intelligence increasingly is present in the most intimate of spaces (such as our homes).

The impact of automation and smart infrastructures on workers, intimacies, and social interaction, is an ongoing site of important scientific inquiry to which our proposed roundtable aims to contribute. However, to date, most debates about AI fail to address the ways in which communities are differentially impacted by AI based on race, gender, and national location. Moreover, they fail to consider the racial and gendered ideologies that inform the conception of “intelligence.” In this roundtable, therefore, we consider, can there be such a thing as a feminist artificial intelligence? What might a feminist approach to (or critique of) intelligence look like? And what are the social/political stakes of such a critique? Can we disrupt the post-enlightenment notions of “intelligence” with feminist approaches to intelligence?

Chair

• Neda Atanasoski, University of California Santa Cruz

Individual Presentations

• Feminist Intelligence and Sex Robotics - Neda Atanasoski, University of California Santa Cruz

• Technofascism and Artificial Intelligence - Erin Mariel Brownstein McElroy, University of California Santa Cruz

• Smart Technologies and Feminist Intelligence - Nassim Parvin, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Border Security AI and the Racialization of Deception - Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, University of California Santa Cruz

Session Organizer

• Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, University of California Santa Cruz