Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Women of Color

I started to write an article about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Women of Color in tech. Three weeks later and stuck on stupid, I am surrendering. The gist of what I intended to write about boils down to the following:

• Experts project that 47% of jobs will be lost to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next 20 years
• Women of Color (all non-white women) represent 9% of techies: 1% Latinas, 3% Black, 5% Asian
• White women represent 16% of women in tech
• As AIs build algorithms, bots and other AIs, how many jobs will there be in 20 years that require an actual person?
• What percentage of the population will lack the technical skills to be useful and be rendered unemployable?
• How much of the automation technology will be imported domestically so that the US labor force is no longer engaged in its own manufacture, production or maintenance?

Women of Color in Tech

With such a small percentage of women in tech, period, what will happen to women’s economic prospects in general in the future, when so many jobs become automated? Will the number of women in the workforce drop back to post-industrial era numbers?

In particular for women of color, will gains in reducing homelessness and poverty within these groups be lost to automation? Lost as a glut of white and blue-collar professionals find themselves fighting for jobs in a job pool that is continually shrinking due to automation?

I express this fear of uncertainty because women have been the centerpieces of black and brown communities since 1619. Women have — through Reconstruction, Jim Crow and, most recently, the era of Mass Incarceration — bore the socioeconomic and cultural burdens of rearing and educating future generations.

In short — AIs and Women of Color — What does the future of automation and institutional levels of unemployment hold for my nieces…and nephews…and the 8 billion other earthlings?

My name is Samson. I’m a human and an anthropologist. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter or Instagram @HustleFundBaby. I would say thoughts are my own…but I probably stole them from a woman.