Unlearn, imagine, build anew: 44th Parker Lecture challenges tech’s dominant narrative

Dr. Ruha Benjamin stressed that the people and companies behind the screen, not the technology itself, are responsible for the harms of artificial intelligence. Dr. Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, called tech industry leaders “the artificial intelligentsia” and warned that they want the public to believe democracy is outdated software. Drawing on Black intellectual tradition from W.E.B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler, she laid out a series of things the public needs to “unlearn,” from the myth that technology has a will of its own to the idea that innovation and social progress are the same thing. She pointed to community fights against data centers, cited research showing two out of three targeted projects have been blocked or delayed, and offered “Ancestral Intelligence” and “Abundant Imagination” as counterpoints to the tech industry’s version of AI. Journalist Richard Prince received the Everett C. Parker Award for decades of work holding the news industry accountable on race and representation. Prince was a member of The Washington Post’s “Metro Seven,” a group of seven Black journalists who filed the first known EEOC complaint of its kind against a newspaper in 1972. He created the “Journal-isms” column in 1991 and has tracked diversity in news media for more than three decades.