Jeff Lockhart, "Learning Gender/Sex"

Gender/sex is in AI. Sociologists and tech critics alike have written extensively about the consequences of it being there. Many technologists and not a few scientists celebrate its presence. But how exactly do gender, sex, and their ambiguous conflations enter into ‘AI’? This talk develops an account of analytically distinct sociotechnical processes by which social facts such as gender/sex become embedded in computer systems, with a focus on contemporary machine learning. As I will show, individual agency, social (infra)structure, and the logic of learning algorithms themselves all have roles to play.