Things have been a little quiet around here recently. Like: tumbleweed blowing across the landscape quiet.
One of the main reasons for that was because I was working to adapt my piece about Portal on Gentle Gamers for The Mary Sue! It's now live on their website, and it concentrates a little more on the false image of AI as inherently unbiased, using GLaDOS from Portal as an example of "AI'd" internalized misogyny.
A quick blurb:
As we surround ourselves with increasingly automated systems, we’d do well to examine how our decades of human biases are programmed into the devices that populate our homes, offices, and pockets. Without this examination, we’ll find that the worst of the voices in our heads—voices that, granted, were “programmed” into us by society at large—will find their way into what we create.
Read "Portal, GLaDOS, and the myth of the objective robot" in its entirety here.
A quick post-script: it seems that there's something in the air/some sort of fantastic hive-mind going on, since the podcast 99% Invisible just yesterday released an episode about the biases in analytics. It's a fantastic addition to the argument I'm making above. You can listen to it here.