On Wednesday I attended the conference at Building Centre and the subject was Building without bias digital technology and architecture for the post-binary. There were four presenters and I cannot describe here how brilliant their presentations were. Particularly the work of Hannah Rozenberg strikes me due her depth on the research and production. Hannah has developed a project about Building without Bias. Nowadays we are moving towards automatization, we are designing with algorithms and heavily relying on technology, but is that technology that we are currently using gender bias?
Hannah showed examples of how AI learns through embedded language and how that is design with bias. She created this amazing website to try to analyse the bias in the language that we use and how each word has an association to SHE/HE. A lot of the AI uses word2vec it is a group of related models that create words embeddings. These models are trained to reconstruct two models of words. The problem that came up from this systems was the identification of a gender bias association. I will not explain here the entire issue but I strongly recommend if Hannah Rozenberg works interest you to read the following article: Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings
You can also see below some examples of word2vec.
Hannah showed more examples where automatized technology is bias, for example, Google translator: when translating in Estonian a non-binary language gender to English using examples as "a person is a doctor" "a person is an assistant" Google translate will translate "he is a doctor" "she is an assistant". Also images used in Google images associates female and male to stereotypes of society.
In these conference there were more speakers and others interesting topics that I will try to post here. But what I took on relation with cities and buildings and the use of technology is firstly the obvious: technology is designed and built by humans who are bias, so that technology will be bias if we do not change it. And the second thought that came from Hannah Rozenberg and the philosopher Nina Power is around what we should look at when designing smart cities: are we using the technology for the sake of it?, for the sake of advance?, because we can?, because private and public sector has their own agendas? or ultimate shall we stop and evaluate what are we doing and how will affect humankind in the long term. I think it is obvious that technologies advances are beneficial but at the same time are having a big toll in our mental health as is social media. Are we design to be bombarded with this amount of data? Are we design to be connected with technology the way we are? If we are walking towards a post labour era or an internet connected almost bionic era, shall we stop and evaluate what we want from it before jumping into it?
I know...to many question all over the place.
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