The following is a sponsored post produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Hennessy.
Joy Buolamwini is a poet.
But she isn't the kind of poet who fills journals with purple prose hoping to some day be published in an obscure literary magazine. Instead, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League is a self-proclaimed "poet of code" who combines engineering with powerful language and compelling performance to ask urgent social questions of tomorrow's technology.
In July, Buolamwini was invited by Hennessy to be one of the bright minds visiting company headquarters in Cognac, France, as part of a celebration of the 200th Anniversary of Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège. And this was a party with a purpose.
Hennessy gathered masters in arts and design, science, technology, music and entertainment, business, aerospace, and the culinary arts for a series of conversations, workshops, and experiences to explore a single question: What is the future of mastery? How does poetry in code relate to the intuition, skill, and tradition flowing through Hennessy's own distilleries?
Part of the answer is in Buolamwini's moniker, which juxtaposes the art of poetry with the applied science and research of code. This is also where Hennessy's mastery lies, in the realm between unquantifiable yet perfect taste—and an expertise in using all technology has in order to offer to iterate and improve.
Buolamwini uses poetry and science in a very distinctive and important way: "I use art alongside rigorous technical research to highlight overlooked ways AI can inadvertently propagate stereotypes of gender and race and other kinds of discrimination," she says. Read the rest
