Technology and technological advances have often been a driver of racial inequities.
Technology was and is a key part of the upbuilding of the inequity by design STAMPS ecosystem that currently challenges us. Technology was a foundation of the transatlantic slave trade of Africans. It was used to continue to oppress and suppress black communities during the Jim Crow era. In recent decades, technology has been used to automate jobs that have disproportionately displaced black and low-income communities, further driving racial inequity. The digital divide has powered educational and health gaps between whites and populations of color. This limits access to opportunity, but also exacerbate educational and career gaps during times like we currently face with Covid-19. In addition, technologies like facial recognition have been found to be rife with inherent racial biases. According to a December 2020 study by MIT, Almost 200 face recognition algorithms—a majority in the industry—had worse performance on nonwhite faces. Finally, since the rise of the internet and digital economies, the racial wealth gap has continued to grow between whites and BIPOC populations as technology entrepreneurs have experienced historic wealth increases.
DGEP has a vision for how technology can be used to benefit the fight for Racial Equity through machine learning and artificial intelligence, supporting the other 5 components of the STAMPS ecosystem. Here are 3 examples:
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1."538 for Racial Equity in the US". This is the most practical and shovel ready project. It would involve putting up a responsive (ie., works on phone or desktop) website that pulled in (via scraper or API) dozens of metrics and created a semi-real time portrait of equity in the US via mapping and other visualizations.
2.“Equity Sandbox". This is an R&D heavy research project that will need to pump out peer reviewed papers before it pumps out user facing artifacts. This is the project with the most wow factor and biggest vision, I think: an ever expanding (potentially agent based) statistical modeling project that tries to game out various scenarios for advancing equity to see how they play out in statistical models. "If hedge funds are using econometrics and ecologists are modeling population changes to figure out the right interventions...". We could bee-line towards a major press pieces backed by the model that says "windfall payments won't necessarily stay in the Black community, here's what the model says will work" and "here's a view into what happens to wealth inside a community after redlining.
3. "Virality of Racism and Racial Inequity". How racism and racial inequity develops, spreads and sustains over time.
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DGEP would break ground on the 538 equity monitor immediately and develop it for several years while the fundamental research on modeling business development, wealth disruption events like redlining, and reparation influxes, or other equity capital interventions. Next we would add the fundamental research to the 538 website as equity explorer. This would potentially allow DGEP to release articles that say "such and such equity project doesn't have a high likelihood of moving the needle for this community while this other one does"... and then help these communities keep track. DGEP would like to offer transformational technologies to understand and harness the power of complexity in serving as a clearinghouse for strategies and efforts to achieve global racial equity. This technology will be a tool of how DGEP monitors and evaluates its stated goals and works in real time.