Meta's AI Council & More

Another rant about Big Tech and AI

💖Motivation Meows💖

Hello, and welcome back to another edition of The Black Cat.

As always, here is some Good Black News.

Maria Rotilu’s OpenseedVC closed a $10 million fund to support founders in Europe and Africa. I believe she is the only Black woman solo general partner in Europe. Meanwhile, Mae Health, which focuses on addressing health disparities that impact Black women, closed an oversubscribed seed round with participation from RH Capital and Jumpstart Nova. Almost-unicorn Uncle Nearest Whisky has acquired the Voldka brand Square One, as reported by Bloomberg.

(I’m thinking of creating a little Wednesday supplement newsletter or something that just highlights all the Good Black News that comes out in a week. Should I do this?)

This month, I’m reading: La Fortune des Rougon by Zola

This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Flamenco by Beyoncé

---

💢From the Chatterbox💢

This week, Meta announced an AI advisory council filled with only white men. This week, me and my colleagues called that out. This week, our article was attacked by trolls and racists alike, showing a vitriolic underbelly of tech.

I was shocked, not by the fact that people were angry at us, but by how many of them willingly came out and said what most of us expected: that they don’t care about diversity, about minority voices, and are tired of hearing us talk about anything that has to do with inclusion. There were hundreds of comments, white men and even women piling on, saying they were tired of the “DEI” conversation and anything that brings it back up is passé. They don’t care, and they don’t have to care.

It was one of those moments where I felt a sense of doom in the world of technology. I didn’t want to be so extreme, but I kept thinking about the fact that technology that isn’t made with women or people of color in mind could literally kill us. When those trolls were piling on saying they didn’t care about inclusive tech, it felt like them giving the green light to whatever the future may bring, even and especially if that future didn’t have someone like me in it. I bring up this example often because I think it’s the easiest way to prove the point of what could happen with rampant innovation without intersectionality: women were not included in medical trials until around the 1970s, and the result of that has been death. Doctors just now are conducting the first cancer study on its impact on Black women — we had existed millenniums without anyone knowing what it did to us and why. And now we have healthcare using AI with algorithms trained on research by biased humans. Am I not supposed to feel even just a tiny bit on edge?