By coincidence whilst the debate was raging last night (local time:), I was busy reading 'Studying Those Who Study Us, An anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence', (Stanford University Press, 2001) which is a posthumous collection of academic essays by Diana Forsythe. She roamed 4 or 5 AI labs for the better part of 10 years using her trained anthropologist's eye to reflect on the culture of AI labls and geeks. A couple of essays concern exactly this point (esp 'Disappearing Women in the Social World of Computing') and I have a feeling that she would strongly disagree with the feelings expressed on this list i.e. that women are scarce because of the nature of the field - she feels strongly it has much more to do with the social attitudes (cultural norms) in the discipline. Ok she took a bit of a feminist angle but that's not surprising considering what happened to her parents (both were acccomplished computer scientist, the father became famous, the mother forgotten), or probably more by exactly her personal experiences in these labs.
Anyway it is a very interesting (and quick) read with some good thoughts/inputs on other aspects of AI (and AGI) thinking - especially the disconnect between how AI geeks think and how the rest of the world (including the user) operates. The article that I found the most interesting was 'The Construction of Work in Artificial Intelligence' where she highlights strongly what *we* (AI scientists) think is real A(G)I as opposed to what we actually really do. It relates to an earlier posting of mine whereby I queried how much time the people claiming to work on AGI really spend on AGI design as opposed to the time spent on peripheral issues (she lists 19 major things AI researchers do, only one of which is related to real AI :) Back to the women, there is at least one very smart woman on this list who's elected to stay quiet in this debate... Samantha? =Jean-Paul -- Research Associate: CITANDA Post-Graduate Section Head Department of Information Systems Phone: (+27)-(0)21-6504256 Fax: (+27)-(0)21-6502280 Office: Leslie Commerce 4.21 >>> On 2007/11/28 at 19:18, in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Robin Gane-McCalla" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The interesting thing about CS and AI is that they are man-defined > fields whereas physics, chemistry, biology etc are defined by nature. > Perhaps the simple fact that almost all programming languages and > concepts in AI were designed by white males (and a geeky subculture of > white males at that) is the main factor that has limited the entrance > of women and other minorities rather than other cultural differences. > > On Nov 28, 2007 7:46 AM, Jiri Jelinek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >Where are the women? >> >> I once read a short article on this topic. The author was trying to >> explain it suggesting that many technical books are using rather >> man-appealing analogies when explaining concepts which has >> discouraging effect for women. They were about experiment with this in >> Germany, planning to rewrite text-books (/lectures) using neutral and >> woman-appealing analogies. I did not really follow it so not sure what >> the outcome was. >> >> Regards, >> Jiri Jelinek >> >> ----- >> This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email >> To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: >> http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; >> > > ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=70075803-05025f
