Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach

What it implies - as these things often do - is that those with a rationalist approach leapt somehow fully-formed into adult life without experiencing anything negative that might have helped build character and "wisdom".

Ironically, the studies it draws on that reveal bias are not "afro-feminist" folk-wisdom but people doing actual academic research.

That work in some cases may well be motivated by the researchers being from particular backgrounds - e.g. marginalised communities - and will clearly be informed by the lived experience of people from diverse backgrounds, but surely in a respectable field its worth will always be measured in what it brings to the discussion that is actually new and verifiable, not what moral-authority-by-demographic-disadvantage the researcher claims?

One concrete example of algorithms run amok is music. Autotune and gridding externalize human creativity and crush it. Yes.

But deciding that algorithms and the Western culture that begat them, as such, are the problem seems a tad bit peevish.

One wonders at the direction of any of this thinking. It seems incapable of any positive outcome. The desire for 'positive' outcomes, itself, seems likely to come under attack for emoploying the English language, the Roman alphabet, and daring to insinuate there is anything amiss with what my strange new overl(ord)s are dictating.

But I think she's neglecting the important reason why what she calls a "rational" approach is so popular: it's the only kind of approach that generalizes across different cultures. When you identify an object detection model that tends to perform poorly on people with dark skin, researchers in Dublin, Tokyo, Beijing, or Lagos can understand and agree with what you've found. If you want to find ways to reduce this bias, they'll all be able to help you look, and you can help them with their challenges in turn.

When you move to her "relational" approach, and start talking about "personhood, data, justice, and everything in between", those researchers are going to have wildly divergent and often irreconcilable views. Even two researchers in the same city might struggle to work together on these terms, if they come from different subcultures with different views about how the world should be. The possibility of cross-cultural collaboration is a big thing to give up, and to most people (including myself) it's really a core requirement for any scientific research practice.