I once tuned in to NPR when they were talking about artificial intelligence, and they were talking about how the seminal figures in the field (e.g. McCarthy) were white men. I reflected that if I had to pick the least interesting possible topic on AI, it would probably be how white the AI researchers were in the 1950s.
> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.
(later, same show):
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
I think this is the transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1161883646.
> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.
(later, same show):
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
I mean, seriously?