Over the last years we have been witnessing a shift in the conception of artificial intelligence, in particular with the explosion in machine learning technologies. These largely hidden systems determine how data is gathered, analyzed, and presented or used for decision-making. The data and how it is handled are not neutral, but full of ambiguity and presumptions, which implies that machine learning algorithms are constantly fed with biases that mirror our everyday culture; what we teach these algorithms ultimately reflects back on us and it is therefore no surprise when artificial neural networks start to classify and discriminate on the basis of race, class and gender. (Blockbuster news regarding that women are being less likely to get well paid job offers shown through recommendation systems, a algorithm which was marking pictures of people of color as gorillas, or the delivery service automatically cutting out neighborhoods in big US cities where mainly African Americans and Hispanics live, show how trends of algorithmic classification can relate to the restructuring of the life chances of individuals and groups in society.) However, classification is an essential component of artificial intelligence, insofar as the whole point of machine learning is to distinguish ‘valuable’ information from a given set of data. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter, that is to differentiate signals from noise, machine learning algorithms become a highly political issue. The crucial question in relation to machine learning therefore is: how can we systematically classify without being discriminatory? (more…)

The years following the 2008 economic crisis have seen a return to questions of social reproduction (e.g. Bhattacharya 2017, Cooper and Waldby 2014, Dimitrakaki et al. 2016, Fraser 2016, Federici 2012, Laboria Cuboniks 2015, Preciado 2013, Vora 2015, and Weeks 2011). A series of issues and problems that were at stake in the ‘domestic labour debates’ of the 1970s and ’80s (e.g. Malos 1980) have been revisited and variously reaffirmed or rethought. Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett’s (1989) influential definition of feminist work on social reproduction describes it as addressing ‘the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally’. As such, it has encompassed an engagement with the (gendered) ways needs and expectations are met, how the young, the elderly, the ill and others are cared for, the manner in which socialisation take place, and the ways sexuality is produced, organised and regulated. These phenomena have often also been studied in terms of the role they play in reproducing society as a whole; both how they serve to reproduce society’s means of producing, and how they (re-)produce various social hierarchies, differences, and forms of inclusion/exclusion. (more…)