It’s encouraging to see increased attention to and understanding of the extractive dimensions of computation. I think for a lot of software-oriented researchers, talking about mineral supply chains feels like something that’s not their problem, or at least not related to the problems they face. But the ideologies of mineral extraction and data extraction are…
By Seeta Peña Gangadharan Speaking to computer scientists at an academic workshop on machine learning, Seeta Peña Gangadharan challenges researchers to think about the problem of disappearing people and history into mathematical equations. Math is deeply political. Yet computer scientists tend to talk about the real world as if they are separate from it and…