🎙 Responsible Tech Mixer Speaker Series: Meredith Broussard - More Than a Glitch

All Tech is Human was honored to launch its 2023 Responsible Tech Mixer Speaker Series with NYU Associate Professor Meredith Broussard to celebrate and discuss the launch of her new book, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, at Betaworks in New York City on Wednesday, March 15, 2023.

Broussard sat down with All Tech Is Human Founder & Director David Ryan Polgar for a discussion about the story behind More Than a Glitch, how inequities in tech development perpetuate inequities in our world, and the unequal distribution of power in tech development – and how people can feel empowered by technology.

All Tech Is Human brings together a global, multidisciplinary, and multi-stakeholder community to reduce the harms of technology, have a collective understanding of values and best practices, and co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest. Read about our mission and theory of change here.

Check out photos from the launch of our Responsible Tech Mixer Speaker Series featuring Meredith Broussard!

About More Than a Glitch:
When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world.

The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself? In the vein of heavy hitters such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O'Neil, and Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable.

Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.

Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

About Meredith Broussard:
Meredith Broussard is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press). Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, BBC, Wired, the Economist, and more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and serves on the advisory board for the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies. More information at @merbroussard or meredithbroussard.com.

📕 You can purchase More Than a Glitch now!

All Tech Is Human’s Responsible Tech Mixer Speaker Series returns to New York City’s Betaworks on Wednesday, April 26, at 6:00 PM featuring media theorist and author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Douglas Rushkoff. You can sign-up now to join us!