What The Matrix can Teach us About Racist Glitches in Google’s AI
Applying an important lesson from Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s book, “Race After Technology” — there may be a difficult truth beneath the glitch.
If you’ve seen The Matrix, you likely remember the déjà vu scene, in which Neo notices a black cat walk by twice:
Even watching the animated GIF can induce some disturbing chills. And that sense of disturbance is no coincidence: as Trinity quickly explains to Neo, this minor “glitch” involving the black cat is actually an important sign. It indicates that the agents of the Matrix have changed something in the program, rearranging the reality that Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and others must face.
As Dr. Ruha Benjamin explains in her book Race After Technology, this scene from The Matrix provides an instructive depiction of a glitch as an important sign to pay attention to, rather than a trivial problem to ignore.
As most of us have spent more time in the digital world this year, we have experienced more and more “glitches:” the WiFi unexpectedly cuts out, websites sometimes crash, Zoom and other programs freeze up, and so on. While many glitches often seem minor, others are quite damaging.
Some glitches represent what Dr. Ruha Benjamin calls the New Jim Code, which she defines as
“the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era”
Here are just three examples of the New Jim Code which involve seemingly minor “glitches” that actually surface much deeper systemic issues. The first is directly from Dr. Benjamin’s book.
