How Culture Gets Into Code
Writing software code is very much about logic and being logical. It’s about solving problems. It can be like some form of magic, which is in part, why coding draws so many in. It seems illogical then, that culture gets into code. But it does. With sometimes profound impacts on humans, both good and bad.
How does culture get into code? Why is it important to understand and what are the considerations in a hyper-connected world? Can it be solved for? Perhaps. Maybe too, culture in the code is a good thing. But how to make it work better?
Since disaster headlines are rather popular today, we mostly hear the bad stuff about culture in the code. Which is good, because that’s how we learn and make better code. But that only addresses a very small part of culture in the code. Two of the biggest challenges of culture in the code is gender and racial biases. Especially in Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like Generative AI, Machine Learning and Neural Networks.
One of the most cited instances of racial bias was the use of AI tools in the American justice system for creating sentencing programs for offenders. The systems disproportionately gave black men and women longer sentences than white men and women. This was because of the data used to train the system and the cultural biases present within the coders who created the algorithms. It’s unlikely…
