The article starts out by introducing a protagonist, Amy Webb, and right off the bat she is injured- a broken ankle. This injury is used to grab your attention immediately so you’re enthralled in what is being said. Bogost then uses Webb’s injury to connect the dots of how her injury produces the inconvenience of her having to go through x ray machines that highlight areas of her in big yellow blocks. This leads her to showing how technology does not take women into their creative processes, and as an end result they are treated very differently, unfairly even.
A second instance is Bogost explaining that Webb encountered other problems while being in this situation with a TSA agent, the physical characteristic of having big, curly hair. Webb says “She’s had other problems with the machines, too, including that her mop of thick, curly hair sometimes confuses them.” Bogost then uses a connection to a colleague, which makes the reader take a claim like this more seriously. It’s bad enough when it happens to one person, but when more people are added into the fold, especially when you know these people, or the author knows them, it makes this much easier to physically identify with.
Bogost uses the sentence “Computers have started issuing prison sentences” as an eye catching phrase that surely pulls emotion out of the readers. At first glance one might think that this is used a metaphor of some sort, but it’s actually much more than that. The link that is offered in this article takes you to another article- one that shows how criminal sentencing uses Artificial Intelligence to deem someone high risk for criminal behavior, and how terrifying that concept it.
Bogost (and Webb) criticizes the fascination with STEM education, and the pipeline of education to workforce as part of the problem with why these fields aren’t very diverse, but beforehand, theres a qualifying statement “Even though she’d like to see more diversity among tech workers, Webb blames educational efforts like those that Constellations is pursuing for the current state of affairs, at least in part.” This is used to sort of soften the blow for the criticism that is to come.
Another very interesting, but simple line that stuck out to me from this article touches on the differences between humans and machines: “Critical thinking is what the computers won’t be able to do,” This is a short, simple statement that has a lot to unpack. In one sentence this sort of sums up why Artificial Intelligence\, and technology might not be so helpful, because it leaves out so much (or even all) of the human element, and therefore it cannot truly do ther job that it is asked to do.
Notice that several of these passages employ a sort of shock factor–catching the reader by surprise with an implication they perhaps hadn’t considered. That is basically a they say/I say tactic–to flip the situation on its head and ask us to rethink something we might think we already understand.