Artificial Whiteness
Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence
Columbia University Press
Artificial Whiteness
Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence
Columbia University Press
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.
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.
In this timely, compelling, persuasive, and eye-opening book, Yarden Katz makes profound contributions to knowledge at the intersections of technology, philosophy, and critical race theory. Artificial Whiteness exposes artificial intelligence (AI) as a malleable technology of power rooted in raced, classed, and gendered models of the self. Katz reveals how the artifice of whiteness provides the organizing logic of AI and enables its racist and capitalist ideological projects to be disguised as socially neutral technological imperatives. George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
In Artificial Whiteness, Yarden Katz takes a deep dive into the history of artificial intelligence in order to reveal its enduring connections not only to the military-industrial complex but also to white supremacy itself. Katz sounds a chilling warning about how amorphous and future-oriented domains of knowledge production like AI—perhaps especially when abetted by the modern university’s false claims to both neutrality and benevolence—are able to be hidden from public scrutiny while they produce inequality, violence, and catastrophe in our world. A unique and fascinating study. Britt Rusert, author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture
For the technology worker, the netizen, and the poet who wishes to tear into the handiwork of empire, here is a book that will dispel the illusions cast by artificial intelligence. Katz demystifies a field built on self-mystification. AI is a nebulous technology, a morally ambivalent discourse, and at its core, a political-military-scientific program, which, like whiteness, masquerades as universal and all-seeing when it is in fact deeply invested in race, gender, and colonialism. la paperson, author of A Third University Is Possible
This is a book about how white supremacy can be found at the roots of artificial intelligence, an ongoing influence confirmed by links between AI startups and white supremacists. Khari Johnson, Venturebeat
The dialog this book introduces is one worth having; I recommend the read. College and Research Libraries
Provides a useful frame for understanding both the historical arc of white domination under which we continue to suffer and the current wave of fascination with AI. Public Books
[A] frontal assault on the flexible and nefarious association between whiteness and artificial intelligence...Highly recommended. Choice
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
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