The Whiteness of AI

It is a truth little acknowledged that a machine in possession of intelligence must be white. Typing terms like "robot" or "artificial intelligence" into a search engine will yield a preponderance of stock images of white plastic humanoids. Perhaps more notable still, these machines are not only white in colour, but the more human they are made to look, the more their features are made ethnically White.Footnote 1 In this paper, we problematize the often unnoticed and unremarked-upon fact that intelligent machines are predominantly conceived and portrayed as White. We argue that this Whiteness both illuminates particularities of what (Anglophone Western) society hopes for and fears from these machines, and situates these affects within long-standing ideological structures that relate race and technology. Race and technology are two of the most powerful and important categories for understanding the world as it has developed since at least the early modern period.