At the teach-in, "A.I. can't fix this: MIT, imperialism, and the future of A.I." #helloworld
Sally haslanger: we have to push back against plutocracy in the University. Who gets to decide the research agenda? Why should billionaires decide?
Elena sobrino: MIT never divested from apartheid South Africa, despite students organizing shantytowns and protests.
Sobrino: MIT committed to examining its past connections to slavery. But it must examine its complicity in present day carceral technologies. What is MITs investment in the prison industrial complex?
Sobrino: why is this relevant to AI? Because prison systems are massive information gathering systems, and computing is critical to the modern prison industrial complex. And there are 2.2 million people in US prisons and jails.
Sobrino: from apartheid divestment to PIC divestment, MIT shouldnt be based on structural violence and mass incarceration
Alex: when he was 12, parents lost their house to foreclosure. Important lesson in privilege of access to a safety net. Became community organizer to fight against evictions in LA.
Alex: came to MIT to learn more about larger systems. Started learning about Steven Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, who owns Invitation homes. He earned millions personally during the foreclosure crisis.
If you Google Invitation Homes Repairs, you'll see many claims, wrongful evictions, failure to conduct repairs, class action suits.
In November, tenants in California tried to pass a rent control bill. Schwarzman and Blackstone put 7 million dollars into defeating the bill. So in Alex opinion, he is not a good guy.
Rodrigo Ochigame: Kissinger supported overthrowing the democratically elected government of salvador Allende in Chile. He wanted to stop the "model effect" of an elected socialist government. "Models" in computing at MITs new college are thus entangled with models of government
Ochigame: Kissinger and the dictators he supported had to imprison and torture thousands of intellectuals so that MIT and the multinational firms it supplied with functionaries could "shape the future"
Ochigame is spitting fire and history faster than I can tweet here
Ochigame: p-sets and autograding are what Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (imprisoned by the dictatorship) called the banking method of education
Ochigame: at the moment of #techwontbuildit and #data4BlackLives, MIT is pushing "how I stopped worrying and learned to love algorithms"
Now @onekade: not only Kissinger but also Thomas Freidman are here to speak on the future of computing. It's frankly insulting to the MIT community
.@onekade running down the 6 specific war crimes of Henry Kissinger
.@onekade: ACLU, #techwontbuildit , and others are pushing back against tech determinism
The People should be the ones who decide whether law enforcement adopts and deploys new technologies like facial recognition
Tech companies are spending millions to ensure that they have no accountability. They want to "regulate themselves."
.@onekade : lawmakers are being told that if they impose any constraints, it will have massive negative impacts on the economy. But the opposite is true: without regulation, we will lose the thin threads that still connect us to a free and democratic society.
MIT students have the power to say: no I won't work for companies that develop technology for ICE, I won't work for torturers, for purveyors of war #notechforice #techwontbuildit
.@onekade: people are taking racist datasets based on racist policing practices and using them to train racist risk assessment algorithms
.@onekade we should take these tools and turn them on powerful people: use them to predict racist policing behavior, racist judges, etc. But where's the money in that?
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