Assignments for Week 2

Lead: Team 1; Blog: Team 4

Reading assignment: (for everyone)

• Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology, Introduction and Chapter 1
• John McWhorter, ‘Racist’ Technology Is a Bug—Not a Crime, Time Magazine, 12 September 2016

Optional additional readings:

• Aylin Caliskan, Joanna J. Bryson, Arvind Narayanan. Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases, Science, 14 April 2017.
• Latanya Sweeney. Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery, ACM Queue, 2013.

Response assignments for Team 2 and Team 4:

• By 10:59pm on Sunday, 7 February, post a response to the Race After Technology (RAT) reading and John McWhorter essay that does at least one of these options:

1. Ruha Benjamin and John McWhorter espouse different views on whether technology can be “racist” and these differences would inform different types of solutions. Summarize the essence of the difference (if no post has already done this well) and explain which view you find more convincing and why.

2. Respond to something in one of the readings that you found interesting or surprising.

3. Identify something in one of the readings that you disagree with, and explain why.

4. Respond constructively to something someone else posted.

Response assignments for Team 3 and Team 5:

• By 5:59pm on Monday, 8 February, post a response to the readings that either (1) responds constructively to one of the initial postings, or (2) does any of the options above, but without duplicating points that were already made.