🌱 AI's Power Shades Lead to Wealth Hoarding

Welcome Back! 👋🏼

I’m taking the time to celebrate organizing wins when they come! While working towards a future without the tech oligarchies stealing our data and pushing more money to the top. Next up in our AI series is how tech is trapping us into an uneven economic structure. Read on for more...

In Case You Missed It: 🌱 The Bros Club™ | Maintaining Tech Power At All Costs

First, before we begin….can we give a big shoutout to the organizers who have been agitating within and outside of the Democratic Party! Voters and organizers have known that we need momentum and enthusiasm on our side to push back against the MAGA minority.

President Biden may have bowed out of the election because of a debate, but that's just when party leaders caught up with voters. The successful organizing for ‘uncommitted’ protest votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and more states helped us get to where the election is today. That was real work and effort that was made on the ground. 🥳

As we move into the general election, keep in mind the ways the right tries to divide. We can all have different views of the tactics, but are all working towards defeating the MAGA Minority in November. And now onto our AI conversation…

AI Doesn’t Give Out Black Jobs

We know the GOP platform and Trump isn't actually worried about "black jobs" and that his fear mongering around immigration is a tactic to divide. We know that ultimately the right-wing's goal is to take us back to a time when white men controlled the highest levels of power and everyone else lives paycheck to paycheck. With the rise of machine learning (which is what AI really is), tech oligarchs have started to make that dream a reality.

Let’s talk about the labor force and what’s still keeping Black and brown people out of careers, jobs, and promotions simply because of who built an algorithm. Last week, I gave an extreme example of how skewed datasets can have deadly consequences using the incessant robotaxis in SF. However, physical harm only touches the surface in how artificial intelligence is harming the Global Majority and keeping people from growing wealth.

Job applications are a great example of financial harm. As we know AI uses old data to produce new answers. So when it’s used to screen for job applications, it will spit out the profile of the person most likely to get hired. Historically, who most likely gets hired? Yep! You see where this is going. The consequences for women and people of color leads to increasing wealth inequality rather than solving a problem we are all widely aware of.

Leave it to Amazon to showcase this for us! Dr. Joy Buolamwini explains in her book, Unmasking AI. When they began to use machine learning in their hiring process, they noticed something strange. Not many women were being recommended to interview. Turns out, the model was rejecting applicants that had the keyword “women” in their resume. Things like if they won an award or went to a women’s university. They literally couldn’t figure out how to take out the gender bias. It was so bad that they had to discontinue the program entirely. The bias was baked-in because the bias was in their own biased hiring data.

Despite the sales pitch, AI can’t actually solve our systemic biases if we don’t work to undue our own biases first. In reality, it's exacerbating the racial and gendered wealth gap. Job application review programs aren't the only way AI is harming wealth building. AI is also increasingly being used for job promotions, criminal identification, debt collection, automated grading, exam proctoring, and more.

In each of these instances, a simple tech error could upend a person's life and there's no human on the other end to complain to.

Illuminating the Power Shades

That’s what makes the AI hype so dangerous. Without acknowledging that we can and will cause harm, the creators of these tools aren’t solving the underlying social issues that maintain our unfair order.

It's out of sight out of mind. However, that strategy only privileges the already advantaged. Dr. Joy talks about power shades, or the bias or systemic exclusion of a society are reflected in data. At a global level, these tools are being used to suppress entire nations of people. This is referred to as data colonialism.

“Data colonialism was here. Just like colonial powers had exploited the bodies and mineral wealth of Africa, now digital bodies were being extracted to build the wealth of foreign companies. Was I contributing to the ongoing exploitation of people like me?” – Joy Buolamwini

Just like with anything, we need a diverse array of people to develop technology so that it supports all of society. There are simply things that people with one lived experience will miss. There's nothing wrong with having bias, we all do. The issue is when we do not acknowledge the bias and try to correct for it intentionally. While we are currently locked in a tech world built by and for one set of people, that doesn't have to be our future reality. The words of Kamala Harris actually come to mind. As her mother would say,

“ 'Kamala you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.'"

Our Next Move | Collectivism

Tech is being used to disempower and isolate us. The more we work with chatbots and AI rather than people, the more people can easily fall through the cracks. This is a recipe that plays into the right-wings hopes to keep us individualistic and fearful. However, that's just what AI is being used for now.

As Linda Berberich shared on the podcast, her biggest recommendation is to go create and do your own thing! There are good use cases of AI that doesn’t gut our climate. Impossible growth is not the only answer to technology. The tech giants like Elon Musk are lining up behind the GOP ticket because they want their tax brakes and no regulation. However, their actions as of late, show that they're actually very afraid.

They’re afraid of Lena Kahn and I’m so here for it!

This is our advantage. Their fears show that they understand what a Harris (or other Democrat) Administration will do and what will fall after that. We've seen regulation work in the past like when Microsoft was broken up.

For legislation to work, we need to be intentional about the downstream affects and uses of AI. Dr. Joy is an advocate for deep data deletion in cases when data was uploaded without a person's consent. That also means shutting down AI systems when they cause more harm than good. We need elected leaders who recognize the root cause of how the tech industry became what it is and what it's doing now to actively harm society. We need to organize and build political power to combat the authoritarian instincts of Big Tech. And with that, I turn it over to Congresswoman AOC in 2019:

"And who are the primary engineers and designers of these algorithms?" - Congresswoman AOC

"Definitely, white men." - Dr. Joy Buolamwini

"So we have a technology that was created and designed by one demographic, that is only mostly effective on that one demo-graphic, and they are trying to sell it and impose it on the entirety of the country?” - Congresswoman AOC

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• 📸 What Happens Next? - The 19th News has a great Instagram carousel explaining what happens now that President Biden has announced he will not run for reelection and he's endorsing VP Kamala Harris.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - With the enthusiasm, momentum, and endorsement behind VP Harris, the transfer of nominee will be much smoother and will make it easy to transfer funds and teams to the new candidate. However, there's still a chance that others will contest the election and that we could have a brokered convention.
• 📚 Biden’s Legacy Will Be Tied to Gaza - My friend, Nadia Rahman, just released an essay about Joe Biden stepping down. She has been vocal about Biden as a President and candidate. She even called that he would not be the nominee on our podcast in December.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - Her piece delves into the "uncommitted' movements during primary and what Kamala Harris can do to win back the "Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, young, Brown, Black, and non- and anti-Zionist Jewish Americans who were horrified by the genocide in Gaza." 
• 🎧 White Women React to Biden & Democrats - Jessica Yellin joined the We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle to react to and process how the Democratic Party got a stubborn nominee not ready to face reality.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - This was recorded before the Sunday announcement, but I still think it's a good listen. What I appreciate about Glennon Doyle is that she understands her assignment. As a white woman, she is unapologetically saying the things out loud and calling in other white women to join the movement.
• 📚 Can U.S. Democrats Learn from the Pro-Palestinian in the UK and France? - The media fear-mongers that a platform that acknowledges Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as the International Court of Justice does, would tank Democratic candidates. However, Natasha Lennard at The Intercept outline the ways the leftist parties in the UK and France were propelled to victory due a platform that supported Palestinians.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - We are seeing the opposite abroad. Plus, AIPAC pouring in thousands into congressional races to attack Pro-Palestinian voices. That tells me that there is real grassroots support here if they are working so hard to quash it.
• 👩🏽‍💼 Progressive Talent Pipeline - Looking for a job that helps create change? If you’re a progressive thinker, policy staffer, communicator, or organizer who wants to serve in a government role, consider applying to the Progressive Talent Pipeline.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - They offer both training and support in finding a job. The organizations goal is a federal government staffed with progressives who represent the country. Apply by August 4!

In Case You Missed It: 📚 Understanding Alt Text

Establishing Your Resistance Plan aka Content Strategy

Creating social change in today’s world is just like creating science fiction! Building and maintaining your content strategy can be tough in our hyper-productive tech world. Why not make your planning process easier and more fun with The Roots of Change Agency’s new workshop: May the Force Be With Your Content Strategy?

​Starting August 20, join social change communicator, Sam Chavez, to workshop and build your content strategy in real-time with a small cohort who are working for social change. I have 3 cohort options available depending on how you work with social change. Choose from the non-profits, entrepreneurs, or campaigns/voter outreach cohorts. At the end of this 5-week course, you will have:

• ​A foundational content strategy
• ​Established your audience and segmentation
• ​Decided on your content channels and goals
• ​A uniquely tailored content plan
• ​A customizable content calendar
• ​A Notion database to create and plan your content
• ​A content planning process to streamline your work

Let's celebrate the organizing efforts that got us here and then let's go win this election! Find our latest videos on our 🎬 Quick Bites page or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

And that's a wrap on this week’s newsletter! We hope you found this helpful in your work. Forward this to a friend and help democratize communications! If you have any topics you want covered or have any questions, please reach out and let me know.

In Solidarity,
Sam Chavez
Roots of Change Founder