Connecting Race to Ethics Related to Technology:A Call for Critical Tech Ethics

Critical tech ethics is my call for action to influencers,leaders,policymakers,and educators to help move our society towards centering race,deliberately and intentionally,to tech ethics.For too long,when“ethics”is applied broadly across different kinds of technology,ethics does not address race explicitly,including how diverse forms of technologies have contributed to violence against and the marginalization of communities of color.Across several years of research,I have studied online behavior to evaluate gender and racial biases.I have concluded that a way to improve technologies,including the Internet,is to create a specific type of ethics termed“critical tech ethics”that connects race to ethics related to technology.This article covers guiding theories for discovering critical tech ethical challenges,contemporary examples for illustrating critical tech ethical challenges,and institutional changes across business,education,and civil society actors for teaching critical tech ethics and encouraging the integration of critical tech ethics with undergraduate computer science.Critical tech ethics has been developed with the imperative to help improve society through connecting race to ethics related to technology,so that we may reduce the propagation of racial injustices currently occurring by educational institutions,technology corporations,and civil actors.My aim is to improve racial equity through the development of critical tech ethics as research,teaching,and practice in social norms,higher education,policy making,and civil society.

Algorithmic Silence:A Call to Decomputerize

Tech critics become technocrats when they overlook the daunting administrative density of a digital-first society.The author implores critics to reject structural dependencies on digital tools rather than naturalize their integration through critique and reform.At stake is the degree to which citizens must defer to unelected experts to navigate such density.Democracy dies in the darkness of sysadmin.The argument and a candidate solution proceed as follows.Since entropy is intrinsic to all physical systems,including digital systems,perfect automation is a fiction.Concealing this fiction,however,are five historical forces usually treated in isolation:ghost work,technical debt,intellectual debt,the labor of algorithmic critique,and various types of participatory labor.The author connects these topics to emphasize the systemic impositions of digital decision tools,which compound entangled genealogies of oppression and temporal attrition.In search of a harmonious balance between the use of“AI”tools and the non-digital decision systems they are meant to supplant,the author draws inspiration from an unexpected source:musical notation.Just as musical notes require silence to be operative,the author positions algorithmic silence-the deliberate exclusion of highly abstract digital decision systems from human decision-making environments-as a strategic corrective to the fiction of total automation.Facial recognition bans and the Right to Disconnect are recent examples of algorithmic silence as an active trend.