I will always be a staunch proponent of actual intelligence—humans reading, writing, creating, synthesizing, learning, thinking critically for ourselves and sharing knowledge person to person. Notwithstanding, I see it as my civic duty to ensure that the proliferation of artificial intelligence does not further exacerbate existing inequities within and between groups of people in our society. I also recognize that new, potentially more catastrophic disparities will rapidly emerge in the absence of substantive equity-minded practices, partnerships and policies governing AI development and use.
This week, I began seeking philanthropic support to launch the National AI Equity Lab. It will be housed in the center that I founded 15 years ago at the University of Pennsylvania and that relocated with me to the University of Southern California in 2017. My work with more than 400 educational institutions and businesses—including big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, SAS, Zoom and Sify, to name a few)—informs the lab’s agenda. My concern about tech inequities is neither new nor opportunistic; it goes back nearly 30 years.
I remember my first encounter with the digital divide. I was a student at Albany State, a public historically Black university in Georgia. In 1997, the summer before my senior year, 11 other HBCU undergraduates and I were selected to participate in a graduate school preparation program at Columbia University. Access to the internet, including email, was so new, limited and unreliable on our campuses. When we got to the Ivy League university, it was instantly apparent to us just how technologically disadvantaged our HBCUs were.
