Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera)
This is about a couple hours of reading front-to-back. You can also just skip to the section you’re most interested in. It also includes some exercises and note-taking spaces for making sense of the information and connecting it more concretely to our lives.
This is a super accessible guide to learning more about AI, algorithms, machine learning and questions of equity in the face of these new technologies. The authors offer simple, non-jargon definitions and explanations of what AI currently looks like in our lives, and its potential impacts on our lives and social relations. The authors take the stance that we live under unequal and unfair social structures, and AI has the potential to further exacerbate those inequalities. However, the authors also call for more democratic and imaginative approaches to building AI and setting policies and rules around it that will help us solve social problems rather than intensifying them.
The authors point to the fact that emerging innovations under development in AI today, like machine learning and large language models are controlled by a few people largely motivated by profit under a proprietary model. They instead invite us to imagine and work toward a future in which everyone will be able to design AI programs to solve local and global problems, and where the technology will be regulated to benefit all rather than just a few.