Gregory's ServerI wrote this short summary of our @DAIR #NoTechForApartheid event co-hosted with Haymarket Books. I came away from the event thinking that this is even worse than I knew and that we have even more of a responsibility to say #NoTechForApartheid. This is the post: https://dair-institute.org/blog/NoTechForApartheid/
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Thank you to Caroline Hunter, Marwa Fatafta, Mona Shtaya, Matt Mahmoudi, Antony Loewenstein and Ariel Koko for educating us. Palestine is indeed the canary in the coalmine. As Marwa said, if you think this issue is too "radioactive" & you don't want to touch it, rest assured it will come to you. It was so fascinating to hear Caroline speak about her experience. Did you know she co-founded the first divestment movement in the US against apartheid South Africa? Hearing her describe the violence, the retaliations, we have a lot to learn from our elders. As Antony said, this needs to be an election issue. The US military industrial complex is only expanding. And to the responsible AI community, you can't ignore this issue and do responsible anything. There are so many awful "AI" tools getting battle tested on Palestinians. This part that Marwa mentioned really broke me. I didn't know. She told us that many Palestinian families decide to live separately so that their entire bloodlines are not wiped out. It is in this context that their communication infrastructure is deliberately targeted. And take a look at how Mona was shadow banned just for performing and sharing analysis about anti-Palestinian bias in content moderation: https://twitter.com/Monashtayya/status/1725515196506976756 What Matt said about soldiers playing a game of which unit is adding the most Palestinian faces to the face recognition database, and getting days off and bonuses as a result is just 🤬. The level of dehumanization is out of this world. And Ariel told us that a Palestinian Google intern named Mai R. Ubeid was killed by Israeli air strikes. Google has yet to issue a statement on her killing. And google has YET to issue a statement! May she rest in power. If you are a tech worker, go to http://notechforapartheid.com to learn about the #NoTechForApartheid movement & email notech4apartheid@protonmail.com to get involved. If you work at Google or Amazon, fill out http://bit.ly/NotaGoogleIntake or http://bit.ly/NotaAmazonIntake to join the movement. @timnitGebru relatedly, I just learned today about Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s links to the Department of Defense (and its promotion of battlefield tech), but am surprised this isn’t coming up in AI reporting, particularly given CSET's board role at OpenAI. Are these sort of connections things your org is tracking? I think it really needs more attention. @kvnweb Sigh. Is that related to the person who resigned from the board they kept on asking me about? Acting like her story was sort of like mine? A brief scan of her bio showed me how much effective altruist she is and how much "US China race" she is. @timnitGebru exactly that! I figured you were already on this. I just stumbled across all this by accident while trying to figure out who funded her work at Georgetown! But there’s been literally zero reporting on CSET as part of the OpenAI story. @kvnweb I know. They're painting it as "here is an ethical person who said the tech is not ready who had a disagreement with Sam Altman and was pushed out" story. And I'm like thats not it. |
I am incredibly grateful to our speakers & this summary only scratches the surface. There are too many important points that I couldn't fit into this post. I highly, highly recommend that you watch the full recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVrjA-5Ak0U&t=3s