DIGITAL LIFE

Carissa Véliz: "The way we are building technology now is very authoritarian" 

The geopolitics of AI are “tense”, but we shouldn’t frame it as a race, argues Carissa Véliz, a professor at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.

Carissa Véliz (pictured above), philosopher and professor at the University of Oxford, is one of the speakers at TEDxPorto 2025, which takes place in Porto on March 29 under the motto "The Big Question", where she will address the role of privacy and ethics in the digital age, as well as the phenomenon of there being few women in technology.

Asked about the frenzy in the United States and China regarding the development of artificial intelligence models, the author of the book Privacy is Power considers that "the geopolitics of AI is becoming increasingly interesting, but also tense".

"I think we have to be very careful about framing it as a race, because a race assumes that we are playing the same game and that the goal is the same," says Carissa Véliz.

But “a liberal democracy should not have the same goal as an authoritarian country and the way we are building technology now is very authoritarian,” stresses the academic, who is part of UNESCO’s Women4Ethical AI expert leadership group.

Given this, "if we won this so-called race, we would be winning a race towards authoritarianism."

This situation "should worry us much more than losing the race," he warns, arguing that the structure needs to change and that the game that must be played "is to build better technology that can support democracies, that is not conducive to authoritarian tendencies."

Carissa Véliz points out that democracy, "according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, is at its worst moment since they started monitoring it in 2006."

Therefore, "it is no coincidence that democracies are facing their most difficult moment at the same time that digital technology is on the rise," he emphasizes.

Are women not as good at technology? It's "totally false" As for the fact that there are few women in tech, the professor at the University of Oxford's Institute for AI Ethics calls it "very interesting".

Because "it used to be the case when we first started building computers, that actually the word computer referred to a person who used to compute, and they used to be women," he points out.

In fact, "when you see the ads for these jobs [at the time], they try to get women to work."

Later, "the myth emerged that women don't like it or aren't as good at it, but of course that's completely false," she continues, giving the example of the social phenomenon that "when a job is poorly paid and not very well regarded in society, it tends to be taken by women."

But, "the moment a job becomes prestigious and well-paid, it becomes male-dominated."

The answer to "why are there more men in tech is the same answer to why are there more men in higher paying jobs, why are there more men in politics and power in general."

The academic cites an article from a few years ago in The Guardian that raised the hypothesis that this may happen because women understand power better, as they tend to be more impacted by it than men.

Interestingly, when it comes to AI ethics, “the most important researchers are women,” points out Carissa Véliz, citing names such as Shannon Vallor from Edinburgh, Margaret Mitchell, Timnit Gebru, Kate Crawford or Abeba Birhane.

"These are some of the best AI ethics researchers, and they are women. Now the more depressing and troubling question is why men are listened to more," she asks.

Suddenly, "a man appears who has financial interests, who is from the technological world and says something about ethics that is much less precise, much less researched and that is tainted by conflicts of interest and all governments want to hear him", he criticizes.

mundophone