How Britain Killed its Computing Industry

Paris Marx is joined by Mar Hicks to discuss why we need to know the history of tech and how the British history of sexism and colonialism in computing has lessons for the present-day US tech industry.

Mar Hicks is the co-editor of “Your Computer Is on Fire,” along with Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, and Kavita Philip. They are also the author of “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing” and an Associate Professor of the History of Technology at Illinois Tech. Follow Mar on Twitter as @histoftech.

• Mar wrote about the story of COBOL computer systems in the early months of the pandemic and how Britain killed its tech industry.
• Google fired top AI ethicists Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell after their research was critical of the company’s practices. Diversity recruiter April Christina Curley was also fired in September 2020.

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