Save The World and Have Parties: Mutale Nkonde

Informer

Last month, I had the opportunity to speak to Mutale Nkonde about her work in leading AI For The People, a non-profit communications agency that utilizes art to engage communities in the risks and rewards of machine learning. Her work has taken on new urgency as quantum, or super high-processing computing, becomes the standard driving machine learning systems.

In this episode, I discuss everything from how she started in a career in journalism then went on to taking jobs with people and organizations with “funny names” in the mid aught’s. I appreciate her focus on the role that funding plays in the tech. world, particularly the damage it causes when it incentives certain ideas of normalcy, typically constrained in narrow, white, cis-het notions of what the future should be. That particular version of the future doesn’t include people like her and she asks, “what could happen when the people creating the technology are black women inspired by the science fiction of Octavia Butler?”