Despite dire predictions, researchers forecast that few industries will lose a substantial number of jobs due to artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, AI is more likely to alter the way humans work. The AI industry may also create new roles, but this may amplify inequality. In this third post in my Sociology of AI series, I explore the perceived impact of AI on jobs, and the stratification that may follow increased automation of the labour market. I analyse evolving policy directions, including a new report by Jobs and Skills Australia, on AI-related job losses. I then review sociological understandings of AI and work, and recent examples of job redundancies. I analyse a much-publicised study by Microsoft, which claims AI can replace 40 professions, including translators, historians, artists, and customer service workers. This case study shows that AI companies distort evidence to overstate the functions, utility, and accuracy of AI technology. I argue that AI discourse hinges on eliminating competition from human professionals. Sociology uncovers the ways in which scientific models and customer data are used to make unethical and spurious claims.
In this second post in my Sociology of AI series, I show that AI companies position automation as being superior to human labour. I review the Australian Government’s recent announcement that is considering changing the law to allow AI to mine copyrighted works. I will show that the economic model used to justify this decision lacks robust testing. I analyse the ways in which AI discourse is ‘manufacturing consent’ to control the labour market. I argue that AI discourse establishes economic power by marketing technological supremacy, using science selectively, eliminating competition, and suppressing issues that undermine AI domination.
This is the first in a series of posts exploring the sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). I cover definitions of AI, before exploring sociological issues of public awareness, ethics, and regulation. I discuss how AI models replicate race, class, and social inequality. I show why First Peoples’ leadership must be central to the development AI policies. I discuss how sociology can address structural change and ethical use of AI. The rest of this series will examine how AI may transform work, and how AI companies are using customer data to grow their market dominance and policy influence.
On 27 August 2021, in his maiden speech to the Peruvian Congress, Guido Bellido, Prime Minister of Peru, was heckled by his fellow politicians, and reprimanded by the President of Congress for giving an extended welcome in Quechua and Aimara. Quechua is the language of the Quechuan people, the largest Indigenous group in Peru. Aimara is the second largest Indigenous group. Bellido is Quechuan. He was elected as the Cusco representative for Congress on 29 July 2021. Cusco is a Quechuan-majority region, where citizens have a legal right to Quechuan language services, and public servants must speak at least basic Quechua. As a public servant and Indigenous person elected to serve Cusco, Bellido had a legislated right to speak Quechuan.
Quechua and Aimara are both official national languages of the Republic of Peru, alongside Castellano (Español, or Spanish spoken in South America). Quechua has an ongoing influence on the evolution of Castellano in Peru. This includes every day words, grammar, conventions used for the third person, and regional variations of speech.1
Indigenous languages are the original mode of verbal communication in Peru. The events in Congress reflect the pervasive impact of race on politics and all other aspects of society.
To explore the functions of race in Peru, I begin with an examination of Bellido’s speech as a case study of race. I’ll then explore the history of race and language in Peru, before discussing why racial inequality persists despite the development of Constitutional right to language and ethnic (cultural) autonomy. I then deep dive into a racial profile of Quechuan people, using data from the most recent Census.
This analysis discusses policing responses to public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically impacting communities with high rates of migrants, refugees, and First Nations people. First, I reflect on some of the lessons from the COVID-19 “hard lockdown” of social housing towers in Melbourne in 2020. I then discuss health inequalities in multicultural suburbs of Sydney, which are now being placed into a strict lockdown. I explore how racist ableism operates in these settings, and what an alternative, cultural safety approach would look like.
There is no more pressing national issue in Australia than justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It has been 30 years since the publication of the report on The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The Royal Commission reviewed 99 deaths in custody between January 1980 to May 1989. However, as of April 2021, 474 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody since the report was delivered in April 1991. This includes five people in past month alone. No police or corrections officers involved in these deaths have ever been convicted, despite CCTV footage, expert witnesses, and other evidence.
If you only do one thing thing today,please sign this petition, asking the Prime Minister meet with families whose loved ones have died in custody.
There are many Aboriginal families who are actively fighting for justice, through various coronial inquests and other legal battles. By taking one minute to sign the petition, your quick but valuable action will ensure Aboriginal families directly affected by the failures of the criminal justice system can finally be heard directly by Australia’s leaders.
In Episode Six of our Race in Society series, Associate Professor Alana Lentin and I focus on Policing the Quarantine. Our racially-driven criminal justice system has been an ongoing feature of colonialism, from invasion in 1788, to the present day. Since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, over 434 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People have died in police custody. Policing powers have been extended throughout the pandemic, and disproportionately target Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other people of colour. This includes the administration of fines, lockdowns, and curfews.
To help us to think through these topics, we are joined by three panellists. First, Roxanne Moore, Executive Officer of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (NATSILS), discusses police accountability. Second, Professor Megan Davis, Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous at the University of New South Wales and Professor of Law, provides insight on constitutional and human rights during the pandemic. Dr Vicki Sentas, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales, discusses racial profiling and police reform.
In Episode 5 of our Race in Society series, Associate Professor Alana Lentin and I lead a panel exploring the impact of race, gender, and socioeconomics on COVID-19, through a lens of intersectionality. Writing in 1989, Professor Kimberle Crenshaw showed that industrial law in the USA treated racial and sexual discrimination as distinct experiences. She showed that Black women experience both racism and sexism simultaneously, and so the impact of each is compounded. Professor Patricia Hill Collins and other theorists have also shown that, without using this term specifically, people in the Global South have used intersectionality as an analytical tool, since at least the 1800s, to grapple with the complexity of discrimination. In Australia, we look to the works of Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, such as her book, “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman,” which examines how white feminist research has established authority by mobilising whiteness and enacting power over Aboriginal women. Intersectionality is not an identity, but rather a way to understand power relations in society, as well as social inequality, by looking at the interconnections of social division, including race, gender, disability, sexuality, and class.
In the video below, we speak with Karl Briscoe, the Chief Executive Officer of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Health Worker Association (NATSIHWA). His organisation has been proactive in producing resources throughout the pandemic, from advice to Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Professionals Resource Toolkit. He discusses how intersections of race and health impact the work by Aboriginal healthcare workers. We then speak with Professor Karen Farquharson, who has studied race in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. She explores how ideas of whiteness are used to dehumanise Black people, and how this has led to disparate health outcomes during the pandemic. Finally, Dr Nilmini Fernando is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Griffith University and a scholar of Black and post-colonial feminisms. She discusses a gap in the domestic and family violence sector, with respect to how violence is measured and categorised. Specifically, its inadequate attention to intersectionality. She notes that, by focusing on colonial definitions of violence, women of colour are inadequately protected when trying to rebuild their lives during social isolation.
In Episode 4 of our Race in Society series, Associate Professor Alana Lentin and I spoke with three health experts to unpack how racist ableism drives the management of lockdown and healthcare during the pandemic. Ableism is the discrimination of disabled people, based on the belief that able-bodied people (people without disability) are superior, and the taken-for-granted assumptions that able-bodied experiences are “natural,” “normal” and universal. Racist ableism describes how ableism intersects with racial discrimination (unfair treatment and lack of opportunities, due to ascribed racial markers such as skin colour or other perceived physical features, ancestry, national or ethnic origin, or immigrant status).
In “Lockdown, Healthcare and Racist Ableism,” we explore the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living with disabilities can be better supported in the health system, how to establish cultural safety during the pandemic, and what an anti-racist response to healthcare might look like.
First, we spoke with June Riemer, the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the First Peoples Disability Network. She discussed the Network’s advocacy on the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, and the impact of COVID-19 on Aboriginal people with disability. Second, Associate Professor Lilon Bandler is a Principal Research Fellow for Leaders in Indigenous Medical Education Network. She spoke about cultural safety and the imposition of heavier restrictions on racial minorities during lockdown. Finally, Dr. Chris Lemoh is an infectious disease expert and general physician at Monash University Health. He discussed his advice to the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, after the Department put nine social housing towers in Melbourne under heavily armed police lockdown. The majority of these residents were migrants and refugees. No other neighbourhood was policed in Melbourne in the same way.
These patterns are now being repeated in Sydney. Eight multicultural suburbs have been put into a “hard lockdown,” including visits by police and military personnel. To see how our guests’ work still resonates in the current context, watch our video, and read a summary below.
In Episode 3 of Race in Society (video below), Associate Professor Alana Lentin and I lead a panel about how mainstream media create sensationalist accounts of the pandemic, and the proactive ways in which Aboriginal people and Asian people in particular lead their own responses. We spoke with Dr Summer May Finlay, a Yorta Yorta woman and Public Health Researcher at the Universities of Wollongong and Canberra. In our video below, she details how Aboriginal community controlled health organisations have effectively dealt with COVID-19 using social marketing campaigns. We also chatted with Dr Karen Schamberger, an independent curator and historian. She covers the history of Australian sinophobia (the fear of China, its people and or its culture), and how anti-Chinese racism plays out in media reports on racism and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Media and officials continue to blame racial minorities in a way that does not feature for white-majority communities, some of whom are boldly defying the lockdown. Why does this happen? Our Race in Society series provides broader cultural and historical context.
The Other Sociologist 