Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence. With Veronica Barassi

Our guest today is Professor Veronica Barassi. Veronica is an anthropologist and author of Data Child Citizen (MIT Press, 2020).

Veronica campaigns and writes about the impact of data technologies and artificial intelligence on human rights and democracy. As a mother, Veronica was becoming increasingly concerned about the data being collected on her two children by digital platforms. Her research resulted in the book as well as a TED talk, What tech companies know about your kids, that’s had over 2 million views. 

Since the publication of her book, she says there's been a huge acceleration in the datafication of children, partly due to the pandemic, and an increase in the ways in which AI technologies are being used to profile people.

Veronica explores what she believes anthropology uniquely brings to the study of data technologies and AI. She asks (and answers), “why would an anthropological approach be different from say, for instance, Virginia Eubanks, who uses ethnographic methodologies and has a real context-specific understanding of what's happening on the ground.” 

Turning to anthropology’s (late) engagement with AI, data, and algorithms, she says it used to be a niche area of research. But “we’ve actually seen a reality check for anthropologists because these technologies are…involved in deeply problematic and hierarchical processes of meaning-construction and power-making that there's no way that anthropologists could shy away from this”.

One of the best books “that really makes us see things for what they are ["in this current time we’re living in"] is David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Graeber “talks about how bureaucracy is actually there to construct social truth, but this type of bureaucratic work has been now replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence”, a connection she tries to make in her article, David Graeber, Bureaucratic Violence and the Critique of Surveillance Capitalism.

We discuss how anthropologists can make their work both academically rigorous and accessible to the public, and she talks about her own personal experience of doing the TED talk and how she felt a responsibility to bring the topic of child datafication to a wider audience, campaigning, and raising awareness.

Veronica provokes anthropology scholars with a call to action given that one of her “major critiques of anthropology…is the fact that as anthropologists often shy away from engaging theoretically with disciplines that do not share their approach". And what does it mean when we say research is “not anthropological enough”? 

Lastly, Veronica suggests that, given machines must be taught basic concepts, like what is a child (“as anthropologists, we know that these concepts are so complex, so culturally specific, so biased”), what anthropology can do is “highlight the way in which these technologies are always inevitably going to get and be biased”. She ends on a note of excitement: “We're going to see such great research emerging in the next few years. I'm actually looking forward to that”.

Follow Veronica on Twitter @veronicabarassi. 

Read an edited version of our conversation together with reading list.