The future of women in IT

 

Many people perceive it as a problem that there are far more men than women in IT. Whether that is because of personal preference, discrimination, lifestyle choices, social gender construct reinforcement or any other factor makes long and interesting debate, but whatever conclusions are reached, we can only start from the reality of where we are. Even if activists were to be totally successful in eliminating all social and genetic gender conditioning, it would only work fully for babies born tomorrow and entering IT in 20 years time. Additionally, unless activists also plan to lobotomize everyone who doesn’t submit to their demands, some 20-somethings who have just started work may still be working in 50 years so whatever their origin, natural, social or some mix or other, some existing gender-related attitudes, prejudices and preferences might persist in the workplace that long, however much effort is made to remove them.

Nevertheless, the outlook for women in IT is very good, because IT is changing anyway, largely thanks to AI, so the nature of IT work will change and the impact of any associated gender preferences and prejudices will change with it. This will happen regardless of any involvement by Google or government but since some of the front line AI development is at Google, it’s ironic that they don’t seem to have noticed this effect themselves. If they had, their response to the recent fiasco might have highlighted how their AI R&D will help reduce the gender imbalance rather than causing the uproar they did by treating it as just a personnel issue. One conclusion must be that Google needs better futurists and their PR people need better understanding of what is going on in their own company and its obvious consequences.

As I’ve been lecturing for decades, AI up-skills people by giving them fast and intuitive access to high quality data and analysis tools. It will change all knowledge-based jobs in coming years, and will make some jobs redundant while creating others. If someone has excellent skills or enthusiasm in one area, AI can help cover over any deficiencies in the rest of their toolkit. Someone with poor emotional interaction skills can use AI emotion recognition assistance tools. Someone with poor drawing or visualization skills can make good use of natural language interaction to control computer-based drawing or visualization skills. Someone who has never written a single computer program can explain what they want to do to a smart computer and it will produce its own code, interacting with the user to eliminate any ambiguities. So whatever skills someone starts with, AI can help up-skill them in that area, while also helping to cover over any deficiencies they have, whether gender related or not.

In the longer term, IT and hence AI will connect directly to our brains, and much of our minds and memories will exist in the cloud, though it will probably not feel any different from when it was entirely inside your head. If everyone is substantially upskilled in IQ, senses and emotions, then any IQ or EQ advantages will evaporate as the premium on physical strength did when the steam engine was invented. Any pre-existing statistical gender differences in ability distribution among various skills would presumably go the same way, at least as far as any financial value is concerned.

The IT industry won’t vanish, but will gradually be ‘staffed’ more by AI and robots, with a few humans remaining for whatever few tasks linger on that are still better done by humans. My guess is that emotional skills will take a little longer to automate effectively than intellectual skills, and I still believe that women are generally better than men in emotional, human interaction skills, while it is not a myth that many men in IT score highly on the autistic spectrum. However, these skills will eventually fall within the AI skill-set too and will be optional add-ons to anyone deficient in them, so that small advantage for women will also only be temporary.

So, there may be a gender  imbalance in the IT industry. I believe it is mostly due to personal career and lifestyle choices rather than discrimination but whatever its actual causes, the problem will go away soon anyway as the industry develops. Any innate psychological or neurological gender advantages that do exist will simply vanish into noise as cheap access to AI enhancement massively exceeds their impacts.

 

 

Google and the dangerous pursuit of ‘equality’

The world just got more dangerous, and I’m not talking about N Korea and Trump.

Google just sacked an employee because he openly suggested that men and women, (not all, but some, and there is an overlap, and …) might tend to have different preferences in some areas and that could (but not always, and only in certain cases, and we must always recognize and respect everyone and …) possibly account for some of the difference in numbers of men and women in certain roles (but there might be other causes too and obviously lots of discrimination and …. )

Yes, that’s what he actually said, but with rather more ifs and buts and maybes. He felt the need to wrap such an obvious statement in several kilometers thick of cotton wool so as not to offend the deliberately offended but nonetheless deliberate offense was taken and he is out on his ear.

Now, before you start thinking this is some right-wing rant, I feel obliged to point out just how progressive Futurizon is: 50% of all Futurizon owners and employees are female, all employees and owners have the same voting rights, 50% are immigrants and all are paid exactly the same and have the same size offices, regardless of dedication, ability, nature or quality or volume of output and regardless of their race, religion, beauty, shape, fitness, dietary preferences, baldness, hobbies or political views, even if they are Conservatives. All Futurizon offices are safe zones where employees may say anything they want of any level of truth, brilliance or stupidity and expect it to be taken as absolute fact and any consequential emotional needs to be fully met. No employee may criticize any other employee’s mouse mat, desk personalisation or screen wallpaper for obvious lack of taste. All employees are totally free to do anything they choose 100% of the time and can take as much leave as they want. All work is voluntary. All have the same right to respectfully request any other employee to make them coffee, tea or Pimms. All employees of all genders real or imagined are entitled to the same maternity and paternity rights, and the same sickness benefits, whether ill or not. In fact, Futurizon does not discriminate on any grounds whatsoever. We are proud to lead the world in non-discrimination. Unfortunately, our world-leading terms of employment mean that we can no longer afford to hire any new employees.

However, I note that Google has rather more power and influence than Futurizon so their policies count more. They appear (Google also has better lawyers than I can afford, so I must stress that all that follows is my personal opinion) to have firmly decided that diversity is all-important and they seem to want total equality of outcome. The view being expressed not just by Google but by huge swathes of angry protesters seems to be that any difference in workforce representation from that of the general population must arise from discrimination or oppression so must be addressed by positive action to correct it. There are apparently no statistically discernible differences in behavior between genders, or in job or role preference, so any you may have noticed over the time you’ve been alive is just your prejudice. Google says they fully support free speech and diversity of views, but expression of views is apparently only permitted as long as those views are authorized, on penalty of dismissal.

So unless I’m picking up totally the wrong end of the stick here, and I don’t do that often, only 13% of IT engineers are women, but internal policies must ensure that the proportion rises to 50%, whether women want to do that kind of work or not. In fact, nobody may question whether as many women want to work as IT engineers as men; it must now be taken as fact. By extension, since more women currently work in marketing, HR and PR, they must be substituted by men via positive action programs until men fill 50% of those roles. Presumably similar policies must also apply in medical bays for nursing and other staff there, and in construction teams for their nice new buildings. Ditto all other genders, races, religions; all groups must be protected and equalized to USA population proportions, apparently except those that don’t claim to hold sufficiently left-wing views, in which case it is seemingly perfectly acceptable to oppress, ostracize and even expel them.

In other words, freedom of choice and difference in ability, and more importantly freedom from discrimination, must be over-ruled in favor of absolute equality of diversity, regardless of financial or social cost, or impact on product or service quality. Not expressing full and enthusiastic left-wing compliance is seemingly just cause for dismissal.

So, why does this matter outside Google? Well, AI is developing very nicely. In fact, Google is one of the star players in the field right now. It is Google that will essentially decide how much of the AI around us is trained, how it learns, what it learns, what ‘knowledge’ it has of the world. Google will pick the content the AI learns from, and overrule or reeducate it if it draws any ‘wrong’ conclusions about the world, such as that more women than men want to be nurses or work in HR, or that more men than women want to be builders or engineers. A Google AI must presumably believe that the only differences between men and women are physical, unless their AI is deliberately excluded from the loudly declared corporate values and belief sets.

You should be very worried. Google’s values really matter. They have lots of influence on some of the basic tools of everyday life. Even outside their company, their AI tools and approaches will have strong influence on how other AI develops, determining operating systems and platforms, languages, mechanisms, interfaces, filters, even prejudices and that reach and influence is likely to increase. Their AI may well be in many self-driving cars, and if they have to make life or death decisions, the underlying value assumptions must feature in the algorithms. Soon companies will need AI that is more emotionally compliant. AI will use compliments or teasing or seduction or sarcasm or wit as marketing tools as well as just search engine positioning. Soon AI will use highly expressive faces with attractive voices, with attractive messages, tailored to appeal to you by pandering to your tastes and prejudices while thinking something altogether different. AI might be the person at the party that is all smiles and compliments, before going off to tell everyone else how awful it thinks you are. If you dare to say something not ‘authorized’, the ultra-smart AI all around you might treat you condescendingly, making you feel ashamed, ostracized, a dinosaur. Then it might secretly push you down a few pages in search results, or put a negative spin on text summaries about you, or exclude you from recommendations. Or it might do all the secret stuff while pretending it thinks you’re fantastic. Internal cultural policies in companies like Google today could soon be external social engineering to push the left-wing world the IT industry believes in – it isn’t just Google; Facebook and Twitter are also important and just as Left, though Amazon, Samsung, IBM and other AI players are less overtly politically biased, so far at least. Left wing policies generally cost a lot more, but Google and Facebook will presumably still expect other companies and people to pay the taxes to pay for it all. As their female staff gear up to fight them over pay differences between men and women for similar jobs, it often seems that Google’s holier-than-thou morality doesn’t quite make it as far as their finances.

Then it really starts being fun. We’ll soon have bacteria that can fabricate electronic circuits within themselves. Soon they’ll be able to power them too, giving the concept of smart yogurt. These bacteria could also have nanotechnology flagella to help them get around. We’ll soon have bacterial spies all over our environment, even on our skin, intercepting electronic signals that give away our thoughts. They’ll bring in data on everything that is said, everything that everyone even thinks or feels. Those bacteria will be directly connected into AI, in fact they’ll be part of it. They’ll be able to change things, to favor or punish according to whether they like what someone believes in or how they behave.

It isn’t just right-wing extremists that need to worry. I’m apparently Noveau Left – I score slightly left of center on political profiling tests, but I’m worried. A lot of this PC stuff seems extreme to me, sometimes just nonsense. Maybe it is, or maybe I should be lefter. But it’s not my choice. I don’t make the rules. Companies like Google make the rules, they even run the AI ethics groups. They decide much of what people see online, and even the meaning of the words. It’s very 1984-ish.

The trouble with the ‘echo chambers’ we heard about is that they soon normalize views to the loudest voices in those groups, and they don’t tend to be the moderates. We can expect it will go further to the extreme, not less. You probably aren’t left enough either. You should also be worried.