Home / Social Sciences / Politics / Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence

AUTHOR
Price
€27.90
€31.00 -10%
Upon request
Dispatched within 15 - 25 days.

Add to wishlist

Dramatic statements about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence for humanity abound, as an industry of experts claims that AI is poised to reshape nearly every sphere of life. Who profits from the idea that the age of AI has arrived? Why do ideas of AI’s transformative potential keep reappearing in social and political discourse, and how are they linked to broader political agendas?

Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. He demonstrates that understandings of AI, as a field and a technology, have shifted dramatically over time based on the needs of its funders and the professional class that formed around it. From its origins in the Cold War military-industrial complex through its present-day Silicon Valley proselytizers and eager policy analysts, AI has never been simply a technical project enabled by larger data and better computing. Drawing on intimate familiarity with the field and its practices, Katz instead asks us to see how AI reinforces models of knowledge that assume white male superiority and an imperialist worldview. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force.

Bringing together theories of whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a deep understanding of the history and practice of science and computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.

Author: Katz Yarden
Publisher: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780231194914
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2020

Preface
Introduction
Part I: Formation
1. In the Service of Empire
2. In the Service of Capital
Part II: Self and the Social Order
3. Epistemic Forgeries and Ghosts in the Machine
4. Adaptation, Not Abolition: Critical AI Experts and Carceral-Positive Logic
5. Artificial Whiteness
Part III: Alternatives
6. Dissenting Visions: From Autopoietic Love to Embodied War
7. A Generative Refusal
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Yarden Katz is a fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT in 2014.

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to receive our new releases and offers
Your account Your wishlist