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A blunt explanation for why technology corporations — consumer facing ones, at least — are taking an unusually bold stand on racism is simply that they are following the public. 

Public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson has talked about how, even if the North won the legal battle for racial equality in 1865, the South won the “narrative war,” leading to the entrenched racism of today. The idea was also well-understood by figures like Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous alt-right platform, who said that all politics is downstream from culture.

Both are pointing to the idea that culture shifts precede changes in large institutions — and if the cultural battleground is not won, institutional change will be hindered. In 2020, there has been a meaningful culture shift around racism.

“If someone’s interested in long term change, the most heartening thing that I’ve seen is polling,” said Mary-Hunter McDonnell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school who studies corporate social activism. 

“The movement has succeeded in problematizing the issue, in making people recognize the issue as a real, legitimate problem. You can’t even hope to start to think of solutions until you convince the people that a problem actually exists.”

Reputable polls have shown that the majority of Americans support Black Lives Matter, and the majority consider racial discrimination in the U.S. a “big deal” — significantly larger numbers than ever before. Millions of protesters have hit the streets from Maine to Oregon; white Americans, crucially, have been on the front lines, too.

The public is responding to a cascade of events: the undeniably abhorrent video of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a police officer, a string of unjust killings — Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain — and the infamous effort by Amy Cooper in Central Park to weaponize the police against a Black birdwatcher. All of this happened during a pandemic where people have more time to follow along and more pent up frustrations. All of this happened during an election year.

“The movement has succeeded in problematizing the issue”

A company’s values are shaped by the values of its leaders, investors, customers and workers. Yet even an amoral company that only cares about maximizing shareholder value has to consider the bottom-line impact of engaging or not engaging with a social uprising, said Jerry Davis, a professor of management and sociology at the University of Michigan. 

“It’s not like there’s the ‘right answer’ to what’s the political stance [a company] should take,” he said, of companies making this kind of cold business calculation. “The right answer is what’s going to keep employees and customers onside.”

For companies to proclaim Black Lives Matter might just be cosmetic. But it is an indicator of which way the winds of public opinion are blowing if market-driven institutions feel they can — or have to — talk about racism.

The paper, published this month in the journal Philosophy & Technology, has at heart the idea that you have to understand historical context to understand why technology can be biased.

“Everyone’s talking about racial bias and technology, gender bias and technology, and wanting to mitigate these risks, but how can you if you don’t understand a lot of these systems of oppression are grounded in very long histories of colonialism?” Marie-Therese Png, a co-author, PhD candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and former technology advisor to the UN, told Engadget. The paper’s other authors were DeepMind senior research scientists Shakir Mohamed and William Isaac.

“How can you contextualize, say, the disproportionate impact of predictive policing on African Americans without understanding the history of slavery and how each policy has built on, essentially, a differential value of life that came from colonialism?” Png said.

Almost every country in the world was at some point controlled by European nations. Decoloniality is about understanding these historic exploitative dynamics, and how their residual values are still alive in contemporary society — and then escaping them.

As an example, the paper points to algorithmic discrimination in law enforcement disproportionately affecting people of color in the US, which recently has been under the spotlight. It also connects “ghost workers”, who perform the low-paid data annotation work that fuels tech companies as a kind of “labor extraction” from developing to developed countries which mimics colonial dynamics.

Similarly, the authors see beta testing of potentially harmful technologies in non-Western countries — Cambridge Analytica tried its tools on Nigerian elections before the U.S. — as redolent of the medical experiments by the British empire on its colonial subjects or the American government’s infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in which African-American men with the disease were told to come for treatment and instead were observed until they died.

As Png says, one of coloniality’s core principles is that some lives are worth more than others. The fundamental issue for AI — which can literally quantify the value of humans — was put by co-author Mohamed in a blog post two years ago: “How do we make global AI truly global?” In other words: How can AI serve both the haves and have-nots equally in a world which does not?

The paper ultimately spells out guidance for a “critical technical practice” in the AI community — essentially for technologists to evaluate the underlying cultural assumptions in their products and how it will affect society with “ethical foresight.”

The “tactics” the paper lists to do this span algorithmic fairness techniques to hiring practices to AI policymaking. It speaks of technologists learning from oppressed communities — giving examples of grassroots organizations like Data for Black Lives — to reverse the colonial mentality of “technological benevolence and paternalism.”

Implicitly, the authors are calling for a shift away from a longstanding tech culture of supposed neutrality: the idea that the computer scientist just makes tools and is not responsible for their use. The paper was being written before the filmed death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, but the event — and a subsequent national reckoning with race — has brought into focus the question of what role tech should play in social inequity. Major AI institutions like OpenAI and the conference NeurIPS have made public statements supporting Black Lives Matter, which at least ostensibly signals a willingness to change.

“This discourse has now been legitimized and you can now talk about race in these spaces without people completely dismissing you, or you putting your whole career on the line or your whole authority as a technologist,” said Png.

“My hope is that this renewal of interest and reception to understanding how to advance racial equity both within the industry and in broader society will be sustained for the long run,” said co-author Isaac.

“You can now talk about race in these spaces without people completely dismissing you, or you putting your whole career on the line or your whole authority as a technologist.”

What this paper provides is a roadmap, a conceptual “way out” of the sometimes-shallow discussions around race among technologists. It’s the connective tissue from today’s advanced machine learning to centuries of global history.

But Png says that decoloniality is not a purely intellectual exercise. To decolonize would mean actively dismantling the technology that furthers the inequality of marginalized communities. “We’re trying to argue a proper ceding of power,” she said.

AI supercharges the idea that those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it: if AI doesn’t remember the past, it will reify, amplify, and normalize inequalities. Artificial intelligence provides the veneer of objectivity — you cannot debate with an algorithm and often you cannot understand how it’s reached a decision about you. The further AI pervades our lives, the harder it becomes to undo its harms. 

“That’s why this moment is really important to put into words and identify what these systems are,” said Png. “And they are systems of coloniality, they are systems of white supremacy, they are systems of racial capitalism, which are based and were born from a colonial project.”

This research also raises the question of what new types of AI could be developed that are decolonial. Isaac pointed to organizations working towards similar visions, like Deep Learning Indaba or Mechanism Design for Social Good. But this area has little precedent. Would decolonial AI mean embedding a non-Western philosophy of fairness in a decision-making algorithm? Where do we categorize projects that involve writing code in Arabic and other languages?

On these points, Png is unsure. The pressing issue right now, she said, is the process of decolonizing the world we’re already living in. What AI would look like when truly divested of any colonial baggage — when the mission isn’t merely to fight back, but to build a legitimately fresh and fair start — is still speculative. The same could be said about society at large.

Abt did have a Zoom feed going, but his face was blocked by a microphone or other equipment. “Please ask Daniel Abt to put his Zoom next time he’s driving, because like Stoffel said I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in,” said two-time Formula E champion Jean-Eric Vergne.

Formula E reportedly checked IP addresses and figured out that Abt couldn’t have been driving. Rather, 18-year-old pro gamer Lorenz Hoerzing, who competes in the parallel FE Challenge series, had taken his place. Hoerzing has now been banned from the Race Challenge series and stripped of his sixth place finish in the companion FE Challenge race.

The online Race at Home Challenge aims to keep drivers and fans engaged with Formula E during the COVID-19 lockdown, as real racing was suspended for the season. It’s also designed to raise funds for UNICEF. Racers use the rFactor2 Simulation, with real-life Formula E and esports competitors often racing together. Formula E drivers must use a standardized sim setup and software, while esports drivers have a bit more leeway, equipment-wise.

“I would like to apologize to Formula E, all of the fans, my team and my fellow drivers for having called in outside help during the race on Saturday,” Abt said in a statement. “I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. I’m especially sorry about this, because I know how much work has gone into this project on the part of the Formula E organisation. I am aware that my offence has a bitter aftertaste, but it was never meant with any bad intention.”