The Poet Of Code

Meet Joy Buolamwini, the woman fighting racist, sexist ai algorithms – and taking on the tech giants.

- Harry De Quetteville

As a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Joy Buolamwini, 29, was asked to construct a supercool futuristic device of the kind that might appear in a science fiction movie.

She responded with the Aspire Mirror, which projected images onto the reflected face of whoever stood before it. “So I could become a lion, or Serena Williams or anyone else who inspired me,” Buolamwini says. It worked quite well, but she wanted to take it further by allowing the projected image to track the moving face of the user, and added a web camera and face-detection software. That’s when the problems started.

“It didn’t really track my face that well,” says Buolamwini, who is a black Ghanaian-American woman. “Then, lighter-skinned people would use my system and it would run away and I was like, ‘Hey! I built this for me. But it works for you.’”

She laughs. Hectoring, it quickly becomes apparent, is not her style. Sitting in the Barbican in London, where she has an exhibit at the show, ‘AI: More than Human’, she guffaws infectiously at the near comic outrageousness of the tech world’s injustices, preferences and prejudices, which together reveal a combination of immense power and astonishing immaturity. It’s a world in which algorithms help decide every facet of our lives: who gets a mortgage, or a place at university, or a job, or stopped by the police, or parole. And yet those algorithms are themselves unchecked by the basic safety protocols that we would expect in any other industry of comparable importance.