Disadvantaged Conundrum

In a private communications channel centered around exploring AI, I posted several papers and articles that discussed the biases that are baked into AI (gender, race, etc.) and at the end asked:

"How do we know that [Product Name] AI doesn't have some or many biases? Is this a blindspot?"

I was attempting to start a conversation that would lead to some introspection. Instead I was met with some resistance, deflection, and dollop of man-splaining. The first response posed an important question, though:

"...I'm not sure we could ever eliminate it entirely. Not saying that we shouldn't try, we absolutely should—I think the biggest question is, how do we make it economical to do so?"

As we explored last week, though, the question sometimes needs to be questioned. I think this reveals some thinking errors in our current system, noble as it may seem to try and seek humane solutions through capitalism. I was able to muster enough courage to ask a confronting question in response (extremely difficult for my submissive personality): "Is it ever economical to protect and focus on humanity?"

Is it ever economical to do what's right?

Maybe—I'm no expert in economics nor political science—but personal experience tells me probably not. I've never personally seen a company (private or public) motivated to do what's right just because it's right. In fact, that's where I've run into some walls that I can't yet figure out how to climb, and I think this will help us examine this issue.

The Disabled God

When I think of Greek mythology, Zeus, Athena, and Artemis come to mind: warrior gods; strong; fickle for sure, but powerful and able-bodied. I only recently found out that there is a god in the Greek pantheon who is disabled: Hephaestus.

He's the blacksmith god who decks out Achilles with a shield and crafts other armaments for various gods. According to the Illiad, Hephaestus enlists the help of automatons like "handmaids" made of hammered gold and wheeled tripods to assist with his craft and help him move.

To me, this starts to paint the picture of the conundrum that I'm in. Accessibility is the degree to which public spaces (physical or virtual) are usable by people of varying degrees of ability. Ideally, that would mean everyone can use a space or get what they need from a website.

You would think that this is just the default mindset, because when you spell it out it just makes sense. Of course we want people to be able to use our website, then we get more potential customers. However, despite my own conviction, despite my own advocacy efforts, I still haven't found sufficient time to learn and do everything I would like to in order to support accessibility in my work. I have to give the same trainings or reminders to the same designers on a consistent basis to stop putting together colors that don't have enough contrast just to read the text. If we can't move past the most basic accessibility principle, how can we ever get to a place where what we're creating is actually accessible?

For most jobs in most companies, the priority simply isn't there. And when it is, it still doesn't help like it could. In my naïveté, I once dreamed of starting a business in which I could build tools for someone with disabilities that would enable them to do their job as competitively as an able-bodied person. I thought that python code was the answer, because it had helped me stay afloat during my MS attack. But the economics weren't there. I was not able to figure out how to do it at a scale that would support my own livelihood, since I would have to custom-build tools for each specific job. Then came generalized AI, the adaptive solution that could help someone accomplish a variety of possible tasks—the golden handmaids of Hephaestus, if you will.

Instead of empowering the disabled to contribute and be included like Hephaestus, however, technology, especially with generative AI, seems to further disadvantage the disadvantaged. Rather than assisting us all equally, I am seeing evidence that AI is simply infiltrating as a competitor to humanity and creating a rift between the least- and most-abled people, like oil forcing water to the side.

I'm deeply troubled that not only does it prevent the disadvantaged from catching up or staying in the same place, it's actually forcing them down. At what point will a company decide to hire a less-able person over some dirt-cheap AI product? At what point do we say, "let's prioritize removing racial and gender biases from our AI product" instead of, "how can we capture more of the market this quarter"?

People are giving up on critical thinking, artistic expression, and basic logic, because they just lean on AI summaries or generated content. I'm starting to find AI-generated videos pretending to be funny "can't believe they caught it on camera" videos. The inauthenticity and the further reduction of quality that we are tolerating is the most disturbing to me. AI has served us well in fields of deep expertise, like in medical technology, but the current deployment and application of generalized AI doesn't seem to be helping as much. Erik Davis is spot on from what I'm seeing: "the technologies extend our creative powers by amputating our natural ones," but it seems like the public-facing, general AI amputates more than it extends.

Cyborg

I have no answers, I have no way to wrap this up nicely. I'll be honest that I'm despairing this week more than usual, because it feels so big and AI is simultaneously speeding things up. The safety mechanisms of regulations, standards, and laws feel paper-thin (especially laws in the U.S. right now). Where we could have deployed AI in a more human-focused way, we've opted for the "quick profits now, fix things later" approach.

I feel like a cog in a system that is starting to spin too fast—it's creating smoke in the machine and sparks are starting to fly. At what point do we end up burning out and tanking the whole system?

All I know is that I can't solve this one on my own. I don't know how to remove prejudice, take care of the disadvantaged, and improve the circumstances of the disabled at scale. So I guess I put my shoulder onto the wall again and keep pushing until it either breaks through or I get strong enough to climb over.