PERSON
Ruha Benjamin
The Princeton sociologist and MacArthur Fellow who named the New Jim Code—the mechanism by which automated systems reproduce and amplify historical inequity under the cover of objectivity—and who insists that the question behind every AI deployment is simply: better for whom?
Ruha Benjamin built her intellectual life around a single refusal: she refused to accept that technology is neutral. This sounds modest until you notice how much of the modern world depends on the opposite assumption, and how completely artificial intelligence has staked its authority on the claim that a machine, unlike a person, can be fair. Benjamin spent two decades demonstrating that the claim is not merely false but actively misleading, that the appearance of neutrality is itself a mechanism of harm. Her central concept, the
New Jim Code, names the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities while being promoted as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems they replace. The
large language models now reshaping every institution are the purest expression of this pattern yet built: the most powerful, the most opaque, and the most trusted systems ever deployed, making consequential judgments across every domain of life while marketed