The Sydney Feminists

In 2019, it is not safe to be a woman with an opinion on the internet. This is not to suggest it once was or that it might be in the not-too-distant future; it is simply an undeniable truth all women implicitly and explicitly understand.  When euphoria around the first-wave of feminism subsided, it gave rise to the second waves’ demands for fairer working conditions and retention of the inalienable right to reproductive autonomy. During this time, women began to regain access to power that had been stripped from them. Women inherently understand the good and necessary work involved of dismantling the oppressors’ political, economic and social structures comes at a great cost. The oppressors do not yield – they appease. And, as Oliver Twist experienced when he demanded, ‘Please, Sir, I want some more’, all oppressed groups eventually discover what awaits them when appeasement is no longer an option. Censorship is oft used to silence the voices of the oppressed who d...

When we think of artificial intelligence, we think of it as objective, impartial and unrelentingly logical. But we need to remember that, at one point, AI is programmed to learn by humans. To learn, machines are fed data sets and they can be full of historical or human bias. Machine learning is something we need consider in the wider community, because as forms of AI increasingly thread into our day-to-day lives, if you’re not male, or white, there could be some problems. A very easy example first. Take Pokémon Go. When Pokémon Go was released, users in New York found the gyms and PokeStops appearing more in predominantly whiteneighbourhoods .  Turns out Pokémon Go was using a crowdsourced dataset from a previous augmented reality game. The people who wrote the algorithms weren’t a diverse group and so their bias ended up in the game. If diverse groups are required to help create unbiased products then it’s worrying when you consider how unwelcoming the tech industry i...