Roles for computing in social change

Abstract

A recent normative turn in computer science has brought concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability to the core of the field. Yet recent scholarship has warned that much of this technical work treats problematic features of the status quo as fixed, and fails to address deeper patterns of injustice and inequality. While acknowledging these critiques, we posit that computational research has valuable roles to play in addressing social problems -roles whose value can be recognized even from a perspective that aspires toward fundamental social change. In this paper, we articulate four such roles, through an analysis that considers the opportunities as well as the significant risks inherent in such work. Computing research can serve as a diagnostic, helping us to understand and measure social problems with precision and clarity. As a formalizer, computing shapes how social problems are explicitly defined -changing how those problems, and possible responses to them, are understood. Computing serves as rebuttal when it illuminates the boundaries of what is possible through technical means. And computing acts as synecdoche when it makes long-standing social problems newly salient in the public eye. We offer these paths forward as modalities that leverage the particular strengths of computational work in the service of social change, without overclaiming computing's capacity to solve social problems on its own. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Computing / technology policy; • Applied computing → Computers in other domains.

A definition, benchmark and database of AI for social good initiatives

“…Conversely, there are many circumstances in which AI will not be the most effective way to address a particular social problem 17 , and would therefore be an unwarranted intervention. This could be due to the existence of alternative approaches that are less expensive or more efficacious (that is, 'Not AI for social good' may be preferable), or because of the unacceptable risks that the deployment of AI would introduce (that is, ' AI for insufficient social good' , as weighed against its risks).…”

Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development

“…To obtain a corpus of manuscripts, we used IEEE proceedings, which is the publisher of most of the premier computer vision conferences (e.g., Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)). We identified computer vision proceedings by (1) selecting proceedings related to computer vision using the IEEE proceedings list; and (2) broadly searching "computer vision" in IEEE Xplore, the organization's digital library. By employing both these search methods, we were able to triangulate on potentially missed manuscripts.…”

“…[26,29]). The acknowledgment of values in computing led Friedman to develop a value-sensitive approach to designing systems [40], which has gone on to influence many design frameworks and approaches [1,11,30,31,77,104]. Bardzell [8,24,65,81] Particularly with its focus on real-world applications, the artifacts produced by machine learning researchers and practitioners -for example, in the form of datasets -are value-laden [51,98,107].…”

Opening Research Commissioning To Civic Participation: Creating A Community Panel To Review The Social Impact of HCI Research Proposals

“…The role of computing in the sustainment and reproduction of (in)equality and social (in)justice is at the centre of public, government and academic concerns today [1,10,19]. Discourses surrounding the introduction of new and emergent technologies into society highlight issues of fairness, and social and technical biases in the systems we design and deploy [31,47,62], and the unintended consequences that these systems can entail, at scale [54, 65,84].…”

“…Research traditions and agendas such as Participatory Design [11,16,53], Feminist HCI [7], Digital Civics [18,73,78,89], and Social Justice-oriented design [20,28,74] have stressed the importance of working with citizens at every stage of technologies design processes that are developed to improve people's life for or with them. These agendas bring to the forefront more prominently the need to explore and respond to questions of accountability, and more broadly HCI involvement in social transformation processes [1,28]. Here, explorations of ways in which we can make our work more accountable to the communities the research is meant to benefit, has to also include new ways we can support the building of civic capacities to hold HCI researchers and those who develop and implement digital systems to account [5,49].…”