Joy Buolamwini, author of “Unmasking AI,” and Fei-Fei Li, author of “The Worlds I See,” will join a live streaming conversation at 6 p.m. PT. Sign up on Eventbrite for direct watch links and signed books.
Li and Buolamwini will discuss their new books with Times audio director Jazmin Aguilera. Times technology columnist Brian Merchant, author of “Blood in the Machine,” also will join book club night.
(From Fei-Fei Li / Flatiron Books)
Li is co-director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Her new memoir, “The World I See,” pairs AI’s coming of age with her own improbable coming-of-age story as a young immigrant overcoming every imaginable barrier.
“The most exciting thing on AI’s frontier is not advertisement optimization,” Li says. “It’s discovering drugs to cure cancer or rare diseases, figuring out climate solutions, discovering new materials, deep under the ocean and deep into space. … If we deprive the public sector of the capability to use this tool, we deprive humanity of the opportunity to know better and to have solutions to important problems.”
Buolamwini is a computer scientist who set out to build robots at Georgia Tech and later MIT. Instead, she found herself confronting what she calls “the coded gaze” — technological systems that did not function for her, or recognize her as equal to her white peers, because of the color of her skin. Her new book, “Unmasking AI,” chronicles her research and journey as the child of first-generation Ghanaian immigrants.
“The coded gaze borrows from the term ‘male gaze’ and ‘white gaze,’” Buolamwini says. “All of these terms truly get at power — who has the power to shape what the priorities are, what the preferences are, and how these prejudices get baked into our system.”
Joy Buolamwini, author of “Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines.”
(Naima Green)
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