AI Oversight & Worker Protections are Racial Equity Issues
By Mimi Fox Melton
Given the tech industry shapes our world, we need people of conscience working to develop the technologies and innovations that materially influence our daily realities. Right now, big tech is largely unregulated, leading to the introduction of inadequately safety-tested AI technologies, and no protections for the tech workers who attempt to intervene in a reckless rush for profits and power. This creates a major vulnerability--without consistent and effective government oversight, tech workers are best positioned to hold the industry accountable, but without protections, they are vulnerable to termination and retaliation.
The tech industry urgently needs a redistribution of power. We stand in support of tech workers everywhere who are invested in designing tech for our collective, social good, and are holding the tech industry accountable. Just this week, leading technologists in AI issued yet another missive on the critical need for regulations in the innovation economy and protection for technologists who attempt to hold AI companies accountable. Ultimately, the letter joins widespread calls for these companies to adopt a set of principles for transparency, accountability, and worker protections.
Our work for racial equity aims to transform the innovation economy, ensuring that tech is designing technologies to create more livable worlds for all. Regulating big tech and creating worker protections are racial equity issues because we know that without the expertise and voices of Black and Latinx technologists and change-makers in the industry, companies will continue to create technologies that will – intentionally or unintentionally – harm and endanger our communities.
Currently, Black and Latinx technologists make up less than 10% of the tech workforce. Since our founding in 2012, Code2040 has fostered one of the most expansive networks of Black and Latinx technologists within the industry. We’ve served as a gateway for hundreds of computer science students into tech and supported 250+ tech companies in redesigning their workplaces to center racial equity. In the last year, our Fellows Program has expanded into nine months of racial equity advocacy training, skills building, industry networking, and community building.
While our community of racial equity advocates play a vital role in instigating change, policies are essential for tackling systemic challenges, fostering enduring transformation, and establishing accountability throughout the industry. Without systemic change, the industry will continue to choose profit over people. Under capitalism, profit is the difference between what is paid for the labor and materials that go into production and the selling price of the product. This system entrenches systemic racism, disproportionately favoring those with the most power to determine wages (the value of labor) and business practices. Inequity looks like extreme wage gaps, salaried employees working through the night, the gutting of racial equity measures, and the termination of those who protest the structures of their workplaces.
Unsurprisingly, systemic oppression within the tech industry operates globally. Google recently fired upwards of 50 people for peaceful protest by employees demanding the ethical and transparent use of their labor. Another example of this oppression is the common practice in big tech to outsource data moderation to an underclass of workers who can be easily exploited. For example, OpenAI developed ChatGPT by paying workers in Kenya under $2 an hour for data labeling, which involves sifting through the internet’s most graphic, vile content. In addition to having their contracts abruptly terminated, these workers were left psychologically traumatized.
A powerful profit incentive, driven in part by the venture capital funding paradigm, means that AI companies “avoid effective oversight” and obscure information about AI systems’ limitations, safety, and “risks [ranging] from further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction.” These are known dangers, and we are already seeing the impacts of AI on our society’s most vulnerable populations. We are also seeing AI-fueled warfare internationally, including Israeli use of AI to proliferate fake social media accounts, in an attempt to garner US political support for the war on Gaza. Within the US, AI is deployed in “predictive policing,” further surveilling and endangering Black and Brown people at the hands of the police.
It’s realistic for an organization to be profitable and prioritize equitable principles and practices. Designing human-centered workplaces is one of Code2040’s strengths. We’ve seen firsthand that when companies adopt policies that center the well-being of their employees, including instituting policies for feedback, offering more connectivity with co-workers during work hours, providing generous benefits, flexible vacation and PTO policies – and much more; companies see an increase in retention rates, workers grow in skill, capacity and performance, and the organization generates profit. Shifting the paradigm to center people will lead the industry into greater possibility, more innovation, and increased profits that can in turn propel socially responsible technology and bring more prosperity to workers and their families.
At Code2040, we believe it is possible for the industry to design toward more livable futures. When I talk to our Fellows and community members, they’re enthusiastic and optimistic about the possibilities of AI. They are invested in designing technologies that create more ease for their families and communities. They are excited about working in AI because they understand the potential to design AI systems in alignment with life-affirming values and collective social benefits.
We have to be bolder and more vigilant in addressing the ways this industry continues to prop up systems that disenfranchise some in service to building power – political, financial, social – for others. The tech industry has tremendous power and influence, and the responsibility that comes with that should call us into deeper commitment to ensure equity and transparency. By offering more than a pathway into the industry, our Fellows Program is building power among Black and Latinx workers to lead systems change efforts, including creating policies, practices, and ways of being that lead to racial justice in the tech sector and beyond.
Our pursuit of racial equity in tech is fueled by our vision of what we know our communities deserve. Together, we can create a tech industry that drives us toward a future where the institutional and historical marginalization and exclusion of Black and Latinx people in tech is eradicated, empowering our technologists to thrive in an ever-growing economy shaped by the digital revolution.