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How to Close Technology’s Race Gap
From voice assistants to facial recognition, the products of Silicon Valley are a reflection of their overwhelmingly white and male creators. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In 2017, a soap dispenser went viral. The video, uploaded by Twitter user Chukwuemeka Afigbo, shows a white man waving his hand underneath the dispenser and soap coming out as normal. When a black palm is placed underneath, nothing happens. The offending machine, a product of Rubbermaid Commercial Products, is tested again as the two men are heard chatting to one another. One directs a question into the air: “What happened to your hand?” The other answers, “Too black.”
He’s not entirely wrong. The soap dispenser sends out an invisible light from an infrared LED bulb and activates when a hand reflects light back to the sensor. Darker colors absorb light rather than bounce it back, preventing the soap from being released.
The video was shared globally, racking up hundreds of thousands of shares and plenty of outrage, illustrating a basic truth along the way. Far from the long-held narrative that technology propels us forward above all else, technology has a race gap.
The idea of technology failing in apps designed for fun is one thing, but look around and you’ll notice that this race gap feeds into most of the tech you use from day to day. If you suspect that the world is designed with white people in mind, nothing makes the point stronger than looking at the new wave of technology omitting people of color from its early development.
Most roads lead back to developers, and tech startups are trying to fill the gaps that the “pale male” developers in Silicon Valley and other places have left wide open. The idea that developers make things for themselves is hardly a new idea, but the idea that you would make technology that omits huge portions of the global population is, beyond anything else, bad business. In 2017, there were reports (with accompanying video) about a Chinese boy known as Liu whose iPhone X’s facial recognition lock software seemingly couldn’t differentiate between him and his mum. The failure posed security risks based solely on issues of race.
