Content warning for graphic discrimination and persecution of marginalized identities.
Professor and emergency physician Craig Spencer gave a talk about the lasting and disturbing legacy of eugenics in the past and in the current day facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Connecticut’s Dodd Center for Human Rights on Oct. 7.
Associate professor of history, co-director of the Research Program on Humanitarianism and organizer of the talk Sara Silverstein gave a brief introduction on Spencer. She said he went to many developing countries in Africa and Southeast Asia to support public health in these areas. Silverstein stressed their collective interest in “historical foundations of public health.” Silverstein also said Spencer is “a fantastic communicator [and] very good at bridging the divides in the public health community,” combining the studies of the sciences and humanities.
Spencer started the talk by doing a quick survey on whether people knew what eugenics is, expressing his own fixation on the topic and how it connects to the present day.
“I’m going to talk about a different dogma that we’re worshipping,” Spencer said about AI. “[And] how one bleeds into the other.”
Spencer views the usage of both eugenics and AI as “push[ing] this data through an ideological filter.” He then said, “What is science going to do, especially in this administration, about using AI to push an ideological agenda?”
According to Spencer, the ideology of eugenics began with the question, “How can we improve society?” Spencer explained that the main goal of eugenicists is to facilitate a superior breed of people. The other goal, according to Spencer, was negative eugenics, meaning that the “feeble-minded” and other socially undesirable people in eugenicists’ eyes, especially rich white people in privilege, shouldn’t breed.
Spencer hinted at how eugenics is ingrained in our society. He said that America built much of the blueprint for eugenics and that the Nazis used American justifications for torturing, sterilizing and murdering people they didn’t want to breed. In 1927, he shared that states had the right to sterilize people who they deem “necessary” to be sterilized.
Furthermore, Spencer made the audience aware about how page 4 of the famous American novel “The Great Gatsby” talked about the supposed positives of eugenics. He also showed a picture of a eugenic and health exhibit, saying, to them, that it was “a mix of entertainment and propaganda.”
The ideology of eugenics according to Spencer was that you need to breed more or else people will out-breed you. When this leaked into statistics, Spencer said, “We moved from casual racism to science.”
Adolphe Quetelet, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson were all influential statisticians who made concepts which we still use today. Spencer said “Every one of them are ardent eugenicists” who weaponized data to push their biases. An example of this bias in action is when eugenicists pushed antisemitic rhetoric by using reproduction data to call Jewish people in the UK “a parasitic class” who would replace British people. Spencer called statistics “the beating heart of the eugenics movement.”
Spencer then shifted the focus to the modern day by talking about AI.
“With every single day, AI is doing things we don’t know it’s even doing,” he said. Spencer believes that AI shows a lot of promise but is also incredibly dangerous and misused. It has led to some people’s deaths, according to Spencer. “It’s moving too fast and we don’t know enough,” he said.
As an example, Spencer talked about the “America’s AI Action Plan” which he said flew over many people’s radars. He said that the purpose of the document was “to win the AI arms race with China” and that, referring to AI safety protocols, “the guard-rails were mostly taken off.”
“American public health has been built on shaky ground,” Spencer said. A lot of historical public health research confused race and biology. White physicians thought that Black people had different pulmonary and kidney functioning than white people, so they disrupted the data for Black people.
For example, the spirometer was built with a toggle that you could flip depending if you were Black or white. Even today, the pulse oximeter was designed only for lighter skin tones and gives inaccurate data for those with melanated skin.
“We have lots of data that don’t reflect the actual realities of humanity,” Spencer said. He said that data is socially obtained and that the American government is no longer collecting data on people with disabilities, people of color and women. “What does that mean for the data we get?” Spencer asked the audience.
With this, providers of bias can feed their bias to AI, and in turn the AI could feed bias to users of their service. He called this phenomenon a “bias positive feedback loop” that could push many things, including ideologically eugenicist thought.
There was then a Q&A session. Spencer said “A new form of eugenics [is] forming.” He then said, “We’re grouping them together to drown them out” when talking about data on minorities. Publications wouldn’t allow Spencer to publish an article calling the government eugenicists because it would make others uncomfortable since many of them don’t know what eugenics means.
Spencer also said the American government is turning public health into an individual effort instead of a collective one. One example is the silenced Ebola outbreak in the Congo without help from America like how they previously did.
“Often time when we’re historians, we’re blamed for indoctrinating the college students,” UConn professor of history Deidre Cooper Owens said. “Folk will blame the historians for writing about dead people. When you talk about systemic racism, if we think about these medical branches, [some medical racial bias] only stopped in the 21st century with the murder of George Floyd. It’s structural.”
Spencer ended the talk by saying, “Eugenics is more than just a word” and that outrage and actions combating this ideology needs to be “less reactive and more of a recognition that we’ve seen this before even if it feels we’re powerless.”