A major expert on artificial intelligence has claimed that the emerging technology is racist, according to Pirate Wires.
Timnit Gebru, a prominent computer scientist, leveled her accusation of racism at artificial general intelligence (AGI), a form of AI that can think for itself, and could therefore fulfill virtually any task. (RELATED: An AI Program Turned All 32 NFL Mascots Into Super Villains, And They’re Absolutely Amazing)
Since her dramatic departure from Google in 2020, which led to profiles in Wired and The New York Times, Gebru has been conducting independent AI research.
Gebru shared her thoughts on AGI at February’s Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, where she argued that AGI is inherently “eugenic” because it is a utopian project and utopian projects are rooted in eugenics. In her keynote, she drew an intellectual line from 19th century eugenicists to figures like Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Timnit for the win.
Yet again. https://t.co/LIGOuNQ2qa
— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) April 3, 2023
Gebru went on to argue that AGI would be used to centralize corporate power and urged researchers to “stop with this whole AGI thing.”
Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), which receives funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
According to the DAIR website, Gebru did a postdoc in “algorithmic bias,” while her DAIR research director Alex Hanna studies the ways in which “the data used in new computational technologies … exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality.”