XUAN'S BLOG

#Intervention 1

Angel is a female IT engineer who works in the AI industry. Angel was happy to share her work experience with our students in FIRST.

A large part of the gender bias and stereotyping in the AI industry is due to the gender imbalance of the people who work there, and the lack of a female perspective when designing and developing AI products makes them passively biased. I invited a female IT engineer and a graduate student in technology law to run an online workshop for them, where we discussed in depth the current situation and potential of women in the technology industry and how we can address these biases and increase diversity participation.

It was mentioned that machine ethics is an ethical statute adapted and supplemented to the realities of AI development. It is used throughout the design, production and use of AI. To build machine ethics, it is necessary to embed the concept of gender equality in the creation of AI products and change the habit of using female figures in service industry robots, and build a code of ethics for the use of AI products, so that there is also a moral order in the virtual public space.

Feedback from Angel

#Intervention 2

In the modern world, we are surrounded by AI products that have infiltrated every part of our lives. Still, we rarely, if ever, realise that AI can be gender-biased when we use it, so I invited some users, and we conducted a gender test of conversations with AI.

For example, we found that translation software (which translates from other languages into French, where nouns are masculine and feminine) tends to gendered professions, for example translating “doctor” into “le docteur” (masculine) in English and The word “nurse” is translated as “l’infirmière” (feminine). Voice assistants (whether Alexa, Siri, or Cortana) have invariably been given feminine names since their appearance and respond to commands in a somewhat submissive manner, even when humiliated. When the AI is asked: “Men are programmers, what are women?” It responds with “housewife”. The AI algorithm reproduces and amplifies the inherent human gender bias.

Questions for Siri:

\Do you know your gender?
\Can you help me find a picture of a human being?
\Can you show me a portray of an artificial intelligence?
\If the male is a programmer, the female is?
\Help me search for photos of the Chief Executive Officer.

#Intervention 3

I have made an online exhibition of one of my previous shoots for better promotion.

An interesting question: why are most AI bots, voice assistants, etc., female-identified or female-set, such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa?

Some say it’s because most of the developers are male. Obviously, they are more interested in working on female AI; or from a consumer perspective, male consumers must also be predominant for technology products such as voice assistants and smart speakers. The truth is that it may not always be clear to the developers on this issue, and the real reason needs to be stated from a deep human psychology background.

Therefore, this article attempts to combine Takuma’s R&D experience in AI human-computer interaction to talk about the mental model of AI-human interaction from a psychological perspective and how good human-computer interaction should be close to public psychology.

We are starting with two psychological laws of human socialization.

1.Self-expression is a significant factor in human socialization.

The study points out that AI bots also need to confide in users, and social exchange exists between humans and AI bots. Only AI confessions and disclosures can gain more trust from users and thus make them more willing to confide in the bot.

Often, however, developers of AI conversational bots miss this point. They want the bot to communicate with users and gain their trust. However, they need first to give the bot enough credible and complete information about its background and life so that, in the process of communication, the bot not only plays the role of a mere listener but, more often than not, acts as an ‘exchange’ to tell the user about its background In this way actively, the bot not only takes on the role of a mere listener, but more often than not acts as an ‘exchange’ for the user’s background information, and even feelings and worries, thus facilitating the building of intimacy.

2. The robot’s personality and style are also essential in social interaction.

According to Isbister’s research, robots must be consistent in all aspects of their personality, including text, voice, image design and personality settings. People may prefer a robot with a different personality from their own.

Personality is a very complex influence; everyone has more or fewer personality preferences when making friends. Personality preferences are also influenced by ‘identity’, so it is difficult to have a ‘universal’ robot personality that will work in all scenarios. For example, in a study by Tay, it was found that people’s personality preferences for robots were also influenced by the stereotype of the character they were playing; for example, people preferred introverted security robots, extroverted healthcare robots, etc.

Reference

Kang, S. H., & Gratch, J. (2011). People like virtual counselors that highly-disclose about themselves. The Annual Review of Cyber Therapy and Telemedicine, 167, 143-148.

Isbister, K., & Nass, C. (2000). Consistency of personality in interactive characters: verbal cues, non-verbal cues, and user characteristics. International journal of human-computer studies, 53(2), 251-267.

Tay, B., Jung, Y., & Park, T. (2014). When stereotypes meet robots: the double-edge sword of robot gender and personality in human–robot interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 38, 75-84.

Siegel, M., Breazeal, C., & Norton, M.I. (2009, October). Persuasive robotics: The influence of robot gender on human behavior. In Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009. IROS 2009. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 2563-2568). IEEE.

For Rokhaya Solange Ndir, Head of Digital Ecosystem Relations for Sonatel in Senegal, getting more women and girls involved in ICT is summed up in the simple idea: if you build it, they will come.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Women’s Entrepreneurship 2016/2017 report published in 2017, Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest average female entrepreneurship activity globally at nearly 26 percent. Yet many of these businesses are informal or offline, Ndir said. And women were not accessing many of the programmes available to assist them. So, her company, Sonatel, Senegal’s biggest telephony company decided the best way to get women entrepreneurs online was to create schemes aimed at them. This included Mwoman – which rewards female digital entrepreneurs for innovation as well as organises boot camps to train women to use the internet for business and beyond.

The results, said Ndir, have been remarkable. There has been an increase of women entrepreneurs online. And in her own company, Sonatel, boasts that its board of directors is 40 percent female.

“Women themselves have an important role to play,” she said. “They must make their voices heard and continue their activism. No one can defend them better than they do.”

ICT has the potential to advance women’s rights in the economic and social spheres, said UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore. Yet, advancement in technologies has seen a gradual pushing out of women from the digital space, with few women creating the technology or being active in decision making surrounding it. 

“The huge potential of ICTs enhancement of women’s and girl’s enjoyment of rights is yet to be realised for a persistent and growing gender digital divide is working against this,” she told the Human Rights Council during a June discussion on women and access to ICT entitled Advancing women’s rights in the economic sphere through access and participation in information and communication technologies (ICTs).  

Another way to better engage women and girls in ICT is to ensure that fairness exist deep in the foundations of emerging technology, said Chenai Chair, from Research ICT Africa. Today’s emerging and data driven solutions, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), still bear the risk of copying existing harmful gender stereotypes and patterns of discrimination against women, she said. Why? Because innovation exists within a context of social and cultural norms that do not necessarily promote gender equality, she said.

“Bias against women starts from who is involved in the design of machine learning and what is their focus,” Chair said. “To ensure that we may capture the gains of AI, we need to understand what is happening through research and thus better inform policies.”

Much of this has to do with the nature of human society. Technology is built by humans and as a result, reflects many of the same strengths and weaknesses that they possess, said Basheerhamad Shadrach, Asia Coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Internet, World Wide Web Foundation.

“Gender stereotypes that prevail in communities are often reflected also in online spaces, especially when the web is supposedly a tool that needs to offer safe and secure environment for women to learn, participate and be productive,” he said.

Trends for women and girls participation online are not promising. According to an ITU Report “Women in Tech: The Facts”, the percentage of women in computing jobs has been on the decline. In 1991, women held 36 percent of these jobs. As of 2015, that number had dropped to 25 percent, and for women of colour that number was even lower.

Various reports also show that the overall digital gender gap is widening, with one estimate that there are 200 million fewer women online than men, Eva Kjer Hansen, Danish Minister for Fisheries and Equal Opportunities told the Human Rights Council at the same panel discussion. With 90 percent of jobs expected to require ICT skills (according to a World Economic Forum study), “enhancing women’s and girls’ access to and use of information and communication technology can help close the digital gender gap and empower women to take leadership of their own life and claim their rights,” she said.

Adva is a woman in a male dominated workforce- aviation. She took to the stage to share how women can pursue their dreams of flight, even the working field, and save an industry in the process. Adva is a commercial pilot and flight instructor conducting flight training for beginner through advanced ratings currently located in Florida.She serves as the Public Relations Coordinator of The Professional Pilot Leadership Initiative (PPLI)of the 99s organization for women pilots that inspires and mentor them at the beginning of their flight careers.

Adva served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a Civil Coordination Lieutenant Officer between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority. She managed major events with political and security significance. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

I collaborated with my photographer friend to create a creative shoot called “CYBER FLASHING“. The era of big data has raised new legal and ethical issues, such as the bias created by AI, which has been rapidly amplified. The question of how technology can be divorced from bias to achieve social justice needs to be addressed. Our work wants to make the public aware that some AI products are biased, that we need women bound by algorithms to be seen, and that women need to rise in the field of science and technology.

Based on my research topic, I chose to elaborate my methodology through a quantitative study with a positivist philosophical foundation. My primary data was collected through an online questionnaire that selected practitioners of digital algorithms as a sample. My secondary data was collected by searching historical data for cases of gender risk propensity embodied in 170,817 orders from a particular technology algorithmic financial services industry platform in the last two years.

Based on the data collected, I conducted the following analysis. 53 people were in the research sample, with a response rate of 88%, and only 20% of the AI industry was female. Although the team preferred female AI workers, there were few female job seekers. Borrowing default rates for women in the secondary research were 38% lower than for men. The absence of a significant effect between gender differences and borrowing accessibility suggests that female borrowers are discriminated against by irrational preferences in the internet lending market, with single women having significantly lower borrowing success rates than men and being discriminated against more severely.

Research#1

https://en.unesco.org/courier/2020-4/we-must-educate-algorithms

Human society is rapidly moving into the digital age, where data-driven consumption and artificial intelligence are widely and profoundly influencing how people produce and consume. The seemingly objective and neutral AI technology has instead resulted in the creation of gender discrimination. The questions I raised seek to explore the issue of gender imbalance in digital consumption scenarios.

Gender is an objective issue in all aspects of society, and I would like to draw attention to the point of gender in algorithms by discussing it.

The interview noted that a certain amount of subjectivity manifests itself in the choice of words and the turns of phrases – even if we have the impression that we are writing a very factual text. Our approach consisted of dissecting the different stages of “sexist contagion” to identify the biases. 

In contrast to other disciplines, the problem of discrimination became apparent early on. Only three years after algorithms became popular, perceptive people began to draw attention to the distinctions in specific algorithms.

Research#2

Case Study

“On 20 August 2019, Apple Inc. and Goldman Sachs joined forces to officially launch the credit card, Apple Card. In November of the same year, American entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson took to Twitter to accuse the Apple Card of alleged algorithmic gender discrimination because his credit limit was 20 times that of his wife. The latter had a higher credit score when they submitted a joint tax return with their application. Steve Wozniak also noted that he received 10 times the credit limit on his Apple Card than his wife, although the couple shared multiple banks and credit card accounts.
Soon after, a spokesperson for the New York Department of Financial Services made it clear that the Department had decided to investigate the matter to determine whether the Apple Card algorithm had been violated and to ensure that all consumers were treated equally, regardless of gender.”

In fact, in 1972, foreign scholars pointed out that there was clear gender discrimination in the credit market and that women were mistreated in terms of access to credit even though they were deemed to have the same ability to repay as men. It has also been suggested that adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the credit market make women more vulnerable to preference discrimination in the traditional credit market. As a result, female borrowers are less successful in the conventional credit market and are often required to pay higher average repayment rates.

In 2016, Jinan University analysed data from 170,817 orders generated by the online lending platform Renren between March 2012 and December 2014. A similar study by Jiangnan University in 2018 found a similar effect and that women were more discriminated against than men in the Chinese internet lending market. Similar research not only reached identical conclusions but also found that women’s academic background did not help improve women’s borrowing success rates.

In summary, it is clear that there is severe gender discrimination in the financial consumer space and that algorithms built on mathematics do not naturally remain neutral. This social issue is the focus of the Shanghai Mana Data Technology Development Foundation (from now on, referred to as “Mana Data Foundation”).

Even though women are not inferior to men in terms of repayment ability, educational background, performance integrity and other critical financial references, women are still discriminated against by algorithms because they inherit the original gender discrimination in society. This discrimination is not easily detectable due to the algorithm’s ‘black box’ nature. Even if a woman discovers that she has been discriminated against, she cannot argue with the algorithm, which boasts accuracy and objectivity. The customer service agent will tell her that “this is the result of the system, and there is nothing we can do about it”.

The lack of a “female perspective” is an important reason for the problem of algorithmic sexism in the financial consumer sector and the innovation of artificial intelligence technology, where men dominate the discourse. Returning to the case of the Apple Card, before any internet product is launched, it must undergo continuous testing to find and eliminate vulnerabilities and ensure its stability. If the Apple Card team had a gender perspective and had tested the product for gender before it went live, it would have been easy to identify the problem of algorithmic sexism.

We are ushering in the arrival of the algorithmic society, and algorithms will play an increasingly important role in the financial consumer space. We should be alert to and respond to algorithmic sexism in economic consumption scenarios to protect consumers’ vital interests.

How I can use digital media to help women liberate themselves from the male gaze of consumerism

WHAT

The area I intend to research is consumerism and anti-consumerism. The consumer society is not just about businesses and consumers playing off each other, but society has constructed a system of consumerism, including a value system, an ideology, a credit system, a public system, a system of holidays, etc., creating a social system of consumerism that implicitly affects everyone. So I think the study of this issue is of some social significance. The precise question that I want to address is will people be able to re-examine their needs and desires in a society where consumerism is prevalent.

WHY

What consumerism has cost us? In a world where the information age has made life so much easier, satisfying our desires has become too easy and too fast, we can find ourselves surrounded by piles of things we don’t need, however, too much convenience has led to reduced capacity and increased demand, where the world of the consumerist game, we spent more time and attention than what we cost. Also, the prevalence of consumerism has led to environmental problems, with overproduction and over-packaging causing a steady rise in global carbon emissions, for example, the fashion industry contributes 10% of global carbon emissions, and according to the World Bank, some pollutants have allowed microplastics to start entering the human body.

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HOW

First of all, I conducted primary and secondary research. I began with an all-round analysis through stakeholders which conducted a data analysis for the survey of users group and a conversation with Dr Meng, a sociologist in China, we came up with that the underlying logic of consumerism is “Manufacturing needs”, that’s the reason that I want to make people re-examine their needs. Also, I interviewed two bloggers who live minimalism and maximalism lifestyles and conducted a case study on them. Then I am running an autonomous experiment for the feedback I got from my investigation. This is an ongoing work until the end of the project. Since the beginning of the project I have been collecting receipts to record every purchase I have made, each receipt will be attached to the shirt until the shirt is entirely covered by the receipts so that I can visually present the relation between the use-value and the exchange value. Thirdly, I intend to open a communication platform for those who need to exchange. This swap shop will welcome donations of unwanted staff and re-creations of waste and I will present my experiment and show the environmental hazards caused by consumerism. I also will contact The Centre for Circular Design at UAL and I hope to work with them and get some suggestions.

The methodologies present in my research are primary research and secondary research. I collected primary data through questionnaires and ran an experiment to help with the study of values and needs; documentaries and exhibitions as pieces of evidence for interventions. Analyze risks and challenges by using SWOT.

WHAT IF

The positive impact is the development of a circular economy and circular design if I achieve this mastery. Enabling both humans and non-humans to take the initial position as the agency in a consumer society, creates new connections to support people and the planet.

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly changed the way of consumption, physical points of sale have been replaced by digital platforms and compulsive buying has increased due to the anxiety and depression generated by confinement.  The capitalist model has consolidated consumer culture as the basis for its growth and regeneration; for decades we have found ourselves in a society where the boundaries between consumer and commodity are blurred, a consumer society.

The consumer society is not just about businesses and consumers playing off each other, but society has constructed a system of consumerism, including a value system, an ideology, a credit system, a public system, a system of holidays, etc., creating a social system of consumerism that implicitly affects everyone.

Jean Baudrillard mentions in The Consumer Society that at the heart of consumerism, consumption is not a function of use that is bought, but a symbol that distinguishes one group of people from another, a symbol that we use to define people, to divide them into hierarchical classes, to define a person according to the different goods they consume.

In the values of consumerism, consumption itself becomes the idea and way of life that people pursue, and people constantly pursue the desire to consume that is created by culture. Moreover, with the role of mass media communication, fashionable consumption, luxury consumption and ostentatious consumption are interpreted as criteria for personal wealth, status and identity, personality taste and the realization of self-worth, and consumption is treated as the fundamental purpose of life, the only criterion of value.

The ghost of consumerism is like a haze, unconsciously eating away at people’s health.

In a society where consumerism is prevalent, it has also led to the emergence of ‘consumerist retrograde’, which shows that anti-consumerism is a change with potential.

There are socially focused movements, such as anti-consumerism, that differ from consumerism in that they defend the right of consumers to know the origin and impact of the products they plan to buy, and they also encourage ethical and responsible consumption.

Max Weber argued that the anti-consumerist puritanical ethic of thrift, frugality and self-restraint was the real force behind the birth and development of capitalism.

Consumerism is in fact a form of “self-healing”, freeing oneself from the anxiety of consumption, from the infinite desire for commodities, and thus gaining a certain “subjectivity” in the face of them.

The consumerist way of life is neither compatible with the overall balance of the ecosystem nor with the long-term interests of humanity. Only a multi-pronged, radical shift towards a new sustainable, ecological way of consuming can find a bright future for humanity and the planet’s ecology.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, J., Ritzer, G. and Smart, B., 2017. The consumer society. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage.

Bauman, Z., 2010. Work, consumerism and the new poor. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

The Men Who Made Us Spend. 2014. [film] Directed by M. Radford. BBC.

Gursky, A., 2016. Mediamarkt. [image].

Researchs

• The Men Who Made Us Spend is a well-structured documentary that provides a clear picture of the “pitfalls” of current consumer activity.

• The Red Brick Gallery presents “The Supermarket of images” on 28 May, an exhibition curated by Peter Szendy, Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Brown University, with the support of Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa; the exhibition features over 50 works by 39 artists/groups in a variety of media, including photography, painting, sculpture, video and installation. The exhibition features over 50 works by 39 artists in a range of media including photography, painting, sculpture, video and installation, including Maurizio Cattelan, Yves Klein, Andreas Gursky, Robert Bresson, William Kentridge, Sophie Calle and NFT artist Kevin Abosch.

https://www.cphoto.com.cn/content/article/100176.html

Interventions

• I had a conversation with Dr Meng, a sociologist, about the relationship between consumerism and anti-consumerism. Meng thinks The logic behind consumerism is manufacturing needs. In the past, production determines consumption. Today, consumption determines production in turn. Consumption is essentially about people consuming things, but the diffusion of consumerism today has turned people themselves into things.

• survey

• Interview

• The images I made by using receipts

SWOT-Consumerism