Paz Peña’s Portfolio

A project designed in association with Coding Rights Brasil.

In the hype of A.I., we are observing a world where States are increasingly adopting algorithmic decision-making systems as a magic wand to “solve” social, economic, environmental, and political problems, spending public resources in questionable ways, sharing sensitive citizen data with private companies and, ultimately, dismissing any attempt of a collective, democratic and transparent response to core societal challenges. To increase critical thinking against such a trend, this project seeks to contribute to the development of a feminist toolkit to question algorithmic decisions making systems that are being deployed by the public sector.

We don’t believe in a fair, ethical and/or inclusive IA if automated decision systems don’t acknowledge structural inequalities and injustices that affect people whose lives are targeted to be managed by these systems. Transparency is not enough if power imbalances are not taken into account. Furthermore, we’re critical of the idea of AI systems being conceived to manage the poor or any marginalized communities. These systems tend to be designed by privileged demographics, against the free will and without the opinion or participation from scratch of those who are likely to be targeted, or “helped”, resulting in automated oppression and discrimination from Digital Welfare States that use Math as an excuse to skip any political responsibility.

Going beyond the liberal approach of Human Rights, which ignores power relations, feminist theories, and practices, builds political structures for us to imagine other worlds based on solidarity, equity, and social-environmental justice. Therefore, we believe in supporting feminist movements to understand the development of these emerging technologies to be able to fight against this automatized social injustice, together, in solidarity.