The Obsolescence of Race as a Concept

Racing Toward a Discontinuity

I can’t remember a time in my life when the topic of racism was more frequently discussed in national news, media, and politics in America than in the past two years. It’s a topic that has spanned headlines in categories ranging from police brutality to Islamophobia to immigration, and was an issue that boldly defined and distinguished the candidates for the 2016 US Presidential Election. Indeed, the frequency of the term “racism” has experienced a historical spike since 2013 in articles written by the “Newspaper of Record”, The New York Times, according to “Chronicle”, the paper’s article/term frequency visualization app (http://chronicle.nytlabs.com):

At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, I find immensely interesting the idea that racism as a topic could enjoy its greatest prominence at a time of the greatest apparent racial equality in our nation’s history. This may be explained partly by the fact that compared to gradual changes in racial equality over the past several decades, a few dramatic events could stand out in starker contrast, especially if they appeared to reverse a steady and continuous trend toward greater racial equality (for example, Donald Trump’s political ascent). Another explanation might be that by lowering the barrier through which ordinary individuals may access huge audiences and by accelerating the speed with which information can be shared with those audiences, recent developments in information technology may have served to create a model for mass communication that has emergent effects we might not expect and don’t really understand. The model may be over-emphasizing certain issues as a result of something like a snowball effect or it may simply be freeing very accurate information that’s been long trapped behind the old traditional media sources. The road to understanding the implications of our new (and rapidly changing) mass communication entanglement and the nature of its impact on society’s accurate perception of information may be long and possibly unending.

In light of the latter view that advances in technology may bear some responsibility for recent, sudden changes in our perception of the concept and problem of racism, one natural reaction is to wonder how upcoming technological trends could shape our views and discussions of racism even further. There are several current technological trends that will soon reach points at which I believe racism and how we think about it will be impacted in significant ways. I’ll discuss three such technological developments here.

Binary Bigotry

An area of information technology advancing at a rate that has attracted a lot of attention lately is what is popularly known as Artificial Intelligence. One major sub-discipline of Artificial Intelligence, in particular, that has made huge strides recently is called Machine Learning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning). Traditional machine learning in its most basic form is a variation of predictive statistics. Given a set of data with several parameters, the goal is to find relationships between the parameters such that a model may be built that uses what it knows about those relationships to predict an unknown parameter in a new data set.

For example, if you saw that ten people with a cough, a stuffy nose, and a fever were demonstrated to have the flu and another ten people with a cough and stuffy nose but no fever were demonstrated to have a cold, if you then met a new person who had a cough, a stuffy nose, and a fever you could logically predict they were suffering from the flu and not a cold. In this case, the facts about chest congestion, nasal congestion, and presence of fever would be treated as “predictors” and the diagnosis would be treated as the “classification”.

This is essentially what machine learning does. A system is “trained” with data that has known values for information about the patient’s predictors in addition to a known value for the patient’s ultimate classification. It then determines which of the predictors best predict the classification and uses that reasoning to infer classifications on new data that ONLY contain the predictors and not the known classification.

Machine learning systems can of course be used to learn the relationships in any type of data and not just those concerning colds and flus. One may, for example, wish to train a machine learning model on data for loan applications. The parameters might include data about past loan recipients with parameters like address, name, age, gender, race, and other facts (the predictors) in addition to whether the individual defaulted on their loan (the classification). As may already be obvious, if there happened to be a not insignificant relationship between the “race” predictor and the classification, even if that relationship were weak, the resulting machine learning model would exhibit racial bias. One could argue that simply removing the race predictor prevents the resulting model from becoming racist, however the model may still find relationships in the data that are a proxy for race. For example, address and name could be strongly associated with race, and if those predictors are left in the model and matter in the classification then the resulting system would still be racist. One could make a second iteration to remove all remaining variables that seem to be a proxy for race, but there are multiple problems with that. First, acknowledging that other parameters are themselves predictors of race could be perceived as a racist act in itself, so the social pressure against having the relevant discussion in a professional setting might preempt the discussion from even happening. Second, in the event that “race” and its correlated predictors are important to the model, removing them would decrease the accuracy of the model. Engineers are likely to resist being forced to create less accurate models. And the farther they are pushed to remove more and more, increasingly indirectly, correlated variables the stronger they may resist.

One might wonder how this differs from the problem of racial profiling as carried out by humans, and why our reaction to it would be any different. The difference lies in the fact that a software system does not possess emotions or ethics so the implications of its racial biases would be treated as different. The connections a software system makes to race could be far more dangerous because they would be interpreted as objectivity and thus could potentially challenge and invalidate many of the traditional beliefs and ethics we hold. By creating such systems we may unwittingly make mathematical arguments about racism and its ethical context.

Ultimately there may be no easy answers to the problem of potentially racist software systems. But even worse, it’s extremely unlikely this issue will become a widely acknowledged and discussed topic until long after the first racist systems have already been deployed to billions of computers.

A Flavor and a Topping

Another technological domain that is advancing at a blistering pace is genetics and its related biotechnologies. One of the imminent benefits of that advancement will offer parents the ability to arbitrarily configure their children’s genes before they are born. This technology is popularly referred to as “designer babies” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designer_baby) and has the potential to yield enormous benefits to society not the least of which would be the total elimination of genetic diseases.

In addition to the public health benefits, millions of parents are likely to welcome the ability to arbitrarily choose their children’s physical and mental characteristics. Height, intelligence, eye color, disposition… anything and everything that constitutes a human being and that is encoded in our DNA will potentially become configurable. Which, of course, means that race would become configurable independent of the race of the parent, as well. This could obviously become a huge problem if certain races were regarded as preferable to others, due to their apparent increased privileges in society. Parents could reason that the choice of race could impact a child’s long-term economic success, happiness, and life expectancy. If such were the case, one possible future would result in a world where the preferred race eventually displaces all others.

To guard against that threat, one might argue that we could simply forbid parents from choosing a race for their baby that is different from their own race. But this approach has a few problems. First, it’s unlikely that every nation on earth would have the same laws, which would open the door for designer baby tourism. Second, it’s not clear — and may never be clear — what traits and genes even constitute race. Is it eye color, skin color, hair color, facial structure? There are probably thousands of genes that contribute to what traits we perceive as part of our notion of race. If society attempted to account for each and every such trait and the genes behind it, the complexity of the regulatory system would ultimately become unmanageable, or at best would fall short of effectively preventing anyone from finding ways to displace their own DNA with that of other races.

Whether or not we act to prevent these threats to potentially eliminate entire races, the way we think about race will inevitably change dramatically once we round this technological curve and the challenges we face will be immense under any scenario.

Realities Bite

Anyone who’s played video games within the past ten years is likely to have encountered the concept of 3D avatars. Some chat programs and other communication apps also have the concept of configurable avatars. For those unfamiliar with the term, an avatar is a computer representation of a user within the context of a software application that serves as that user’s persona within the environment of the application (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(computing)). It’s something like a digital alter ego.

As Virtual Reality becomes a better and better simulation of true reality and expands further and further toward total mainstream adoption, the concept of avatars will take on a deeper meaning to their users and society. Not entirely unlike Designer Baby technology, VR may offer the ability to totally customize an avatar’s appearance. This means, in the extreme case, a user could choose an avatar that looks nothing like their real-world selves, including appearing to belong to a different race. If VR begins to become a predominant interface through which we interact with the world, this could have dire consequences for our notions of race and the ethics of race.

On one hand, one could imagine the elimination of race as a concept as we currently know it. The extent of variation in physical appearance made possible by the avatar design system could be such that identifiable races totally disappear. If one can design an avatar that looks like Godzilla, then their apparent race can’t even be classified within the traditional scheme. Additionally, if the system supports the ability to change avatars arbitrarily frequently then identity and physical appearance have an even weaker connection.

It could be argued that the prospect of race disappearing as a concept relevant to day-to-day life would be more beneficial than detrimental to society. However, the prospect of race as we know it disappearing from our consciousness is not one to be taken lightly, as it could mean discarding our memory of racial injustices. In the extreme, it could amount to humanity shedding any guilt or blame once-and-for-all for past racial injustices.

(As an aside, in a VR world where physical, real-world race is not apparent, the existence of government policies relating to race would necessitate that the real-world race of an individual be officially recorded somewhere, otherwise virtual trans-racialism could be exploited to unjustly qualify for government benefits.)

There are also scenarios to consider in which race takes on a new meaning, rather than disappearing as a concept. In one scenario, individuals may define their own new race, to which membership is voluntary, possibly even adjusting the appearances of their avatars to match their definition of that new race. In such a scenario the concept of race-at-birth would be replaced by the concept of race as a voluntary choice. Race might then become a characteristic that simply reflects a philosophical position, such as a political affiliation or a religious belief system. One of the risks in such a scenario is that since the new concept of race reflects a voluntary choice, prejudices against race would not be treated as bigotry but as something more akin to taste preferences.

The variety of potential implications VR will pose to our concepts of racial ethics is as extensive as the variety of worlds and avatars we could create within it. The implications are similarly vast for machine learning and Designer Babies. The limited explorations in this essay hopefully provide at least a peek into some of those scenarios and their implications to the extent that a modicum of interest in these issues has been stimulated in the reader.