Billionaire Bill Gates’ nonprofit foundation appears to be quietly working to make artificial intelligence more “equitable.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a page on its website dedicated to “AI equity: Ensuring access to AI for all.”
“At the foundation, we’ve invested in dozens of applications of AI for global health and development, and our focus on access and equity continues to be fundamental to this work,” the page reads.
It goes on to describe how the foundation is dedicated to promoting “greater equity and opportunity for resource-poor communities.”
The idea appears to be that everybody should have access to AI tools and technology. While that sounds nice in theory, the problem with so-called “equity” is that it’s the opposite of actual equality.
“Equity” is essentially a nickname for equal outcomes. While the equality sought by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was about making sure everybody was afforded the same opportunities, the “equity” sought by the Gates Foundation is about making certain that everybody benefits from the same outcome, irrespective of whether they earned it.
The problem with “equity” is that the only way to manifest equal outcomes is through discrimination. Sound familiar?
“Equality means equal treatment, unbiased competition and impartially judged outcomes. Equity means equal outcomes, achieved if necessary by unequal treatment, biased competition and preferential judging,” according to Charles Lipson, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.
“The demand for equal outcomes contradicts a millennium of Anglo-Saxon law and political evolution. It undermines the Enlightenment principle of equal treatment for individuals of different social rank and religion. America’s Founders drew on those roots when they declared independence, saying it was ‘self-evident’ that ‘all men are created equal,’” he explained in a 2021 Wall Street Journal column.
The real-world application of “equity” therefore always coincides with active, persistent, and malicious discrimination.
When the Biden administration sought to “equitably” distribute loans to farmers in 2021, for example, all farmers wound up receiving loans except the white ones.
The administration is doing something similar vis-a-vis housing. In February, the administration specifically released a plan to take the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and augment it with a new, race-based Affirmatively Further Fair Housing policy.
According to Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute, the policy would require that any jurisdiction that receives money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development piece together a plan to promote so-called racial “equity.”
Specifically, the jurisdictions would need to “promote equity in their communities, decrease segregation, and increase access to opportunity and community assets for people of color and other underserved communities,” he explained for Fox News.
“Such equity could mean anything from building low-income housing to redrawing school district lines for racial or socio-economic integration, all as assessed by the HUD,” Husock wrote in a column for Fox News.
One part of the plan called for relocating poor households to wealthy neighborhoods. But Husock warned that this would backfire.
By forcing poor families into rich neighborhoods, he contended, the government would be instituting “comparable life outcomes for those making distinct life choices.” And by doing this, he continued, it’d be negatively impacting whites and blacks equally.
“Don’t be surprised if those objecting include the suburban African-American middle class, which has worked hard and played by the rules. Their concern was captured in a recent New York Times article about ‘black flight’ from racially integrated Shaker Heights, Ohio,” he wrote.
Dovetailing back to the Gates Foundation, its “equity” goal aligns with the vision of the discredited and oftentimes Orwellian World Economic Forum.
Indeed, the WEF contains its own webpage about “A Blueprint for Equity and Inclusion in Artificial Intelligence.”
As previously documented, “inclusion” is a false term used by leftists to call for including everybody in the conversation or event except for dissidents, particularly right-wing dissidents.
But it gets worse.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) has great potential to benefit society, but the technology’s full potential can only be realized if it is representative of the diversity of populations it impacts throughout every step of its development,” the page reads.
“With growing concerns about bias, data privacy and lack of representation, it is critical to re-evaluate the way in which AI is both designed and deployed to ensure that all affected stakeholders and communities reap the benefits of the technology,” it continues.
Knowing how “equity” has been applied in real life, it’s feasible to worry that “equity” in AI could one day mean denying AI to wealthier countries but giving it to poorer countries, ostensibly to “even things out” …