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Machine Logic: Our Lives Are Ruled By Big Tech's 'Decisions By Data' (theguardian.com)
With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are increasingly moving to a world where many decisions around us are shaped by calculations rather than traditional human judgement. The Guardian, citing many industry experts, reminds us that these technologies filter who and what counts, including "who is released from jail, and what kind of treatment you will get in hospital." A digital media professor said, these digital companies allow us to act, but in a very fine-grained, datafied, algorithm-ready way. "They put life to work, by rendering life in Taylorist data points that can be counted and measured" From the report (edited and condensed): Jose van Dijck, president of the Dutch Royal Academy and the conference's keynote speaker, expands further. Datification is the core logic of what she calls "the platform society," in which companies bypass traditional institutions, norms and codes by promising something better and more efficient -- appealing deceptively to public values, while obscuring private gain. Van Dijck and peers have nascent, urgent ideas. They commence with a pressing agenda for strong interdisciplinary research -- something Kate Crawford is spearheading at Microsoft Research, as are many other institutions, including the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. There's the old theory to confront, that this is a conscious move on the part of consumers and, if so, there's always a theoretical opt-out. Yet even digital activists plot by Gmail, concedes Fieke Jansen of the Berlin-based advocacy organisation Tactical Tech. The Big Five tech companies, as well as the extremely concentrated sources of finance behind them, are at the vanguard of "a society of centralized power and wealth. "How did we let it get this far?" she asks. Crawford says there are very practical reasons why tech companies have become so powerful. "We're trying to put so much responsibility on to individuals to step away from the 'evil platforms,' whereas in reality, there are so many reasons why people can't. The opportunity costs to employment, to their friends, to their families, are so high" she says.
The problem is not that decisions are being made by machines with little human input. The problem is that humans are getting very little insight into how the decisions are being made, and thus very little input into the decision making processes, and even less ability to find and correct errors.
Machines making decisions can be a very good thing. Machines making decisions for reasons that humans are not given enough information to follow is likely to be not.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Simple - *Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Welcome our new robot overlords.
Seriously, it's time to take away decision making from power-drunk nazi bureaucrats.
Indeed, the biggest problem with this article is that it starts out from a base assumption that is flawed - that for some unknown reason, human "moral judgement" is superior to that of an algorithm based on big data, without giving any logical reason WHY we should trust humans more.
However, given the way humans act around the world globally - on average I would take a machine's judgement over a human's judgement any day of the weekm
The AI says your projected lifetime earnings are too small to pay off your projected lifetime debt. You die now.
Your lifetime total health insurance premiums won't cover the remaining medical costs from your car accident, your policy is hereby cancelled.
Why the fuck are you outsourcing JUDGEMENT anyway?
CYA. If I do what I'm told when I'm told because I'm told, they said I can keep my job.
Because humans are notoriously inaccurate and biased when it comes to making judgements. If we could rely on people to make perfect, rational decisions constantly, there would be no:
- Market bubbles and crashes;
- Racism; Sexism; Most other nasty prejudiced and bigoted behavior;
- negligence;
People are emotional, irrational, and panicky, and make decisions that they *think* are rational all the time, but which actually turn out to be irrational, sub-optimal decisions. Study after study has found that "actuarial" judgement (e.g., classification and decision making based on statistical models) routinely outperforms "clinical" judgement (e.g., expert interpretation of the facts resulting in a decision about how to proceed).
So, "outsourcing judgement" is a perfectly valid and reasonable solution for the problem of "experts" being, in fact, less "expert" than statistical models. The major caveat with doing this is that it's possible to write rules that are harmful to the groups being judged (e.g., "it's likely you have cancer, so we are cancelling your insurance.") - if the statistical model is written to protect the profit margins of the company building the model, rather than protect the safety of the person whose situation is being judged, then you have a likely target for regulation.
That said, though, it's not a very controversial statement to say that statistical models are, generally, better at making decisions than "experts." Even REALLY EXPERT experts.
And that's why the fuck you would outsource judgement.
This reminds me of Idiocracy: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8845515/Idiocracy.2006.WEB-DL.1080p.x264.anoXmous.
"The computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody!"
It starts by pointing out the increasing use of models to perform impactful decisions, it questions the morality of pressing people through biased, standardized metrics without considering the specifics of each individual, then it draws unsuspectingly in the big five of technology and indirectly their various AI projects, personal data collection and standardization. It suggests that we can somehow transcend our "traditional institutions, norms and codes by promising something better and more efficient."
Sorry, not all of us can't put our culture and law books aside and become an American libertarian without being dragged before a court sooner or later. Rather, our traditional institutions, norms and codes are expressed more efficiently, inhumanely and uncompromisingly, as the model society evolves towards ever more automated decision making. It is all done in a fair and balanced way as the law requires, or the legislator and executioner are the ones getting stuck in the machine.
Software engineers should read the IEEE Code of Ethics, especially the part about "avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action."
And their numbers have always been abstracted. The numbers "big data" has come from somewhere, studies, manual input, algorithms written by humans to turn analog input into digital output, all are prone to error, as they have been in the past. When all these numbers are compiled and they are presented in a particular context by an interested party, a human decision / consultation will probably ensue, also not infallible.
I don't really see what changes here...
Twinstiq, game news
In some places, no one will even see your resume unless it has keywords they're searching for in it. Was there a time where you actually dropped off a paper resume to be reviewed?
Thinking of these things as overly smart is gonna get a lot of people hurt. There have been a few documented examples where acting on AI results and assuming causation have caused harm.
I suspect a lot more lives have been ruined by the incompetent hacks at The Grauniad than by Big Data.
I first realized something to this effect way back in 2002, when a company called Ctrax offered a download-based DRM music service for college students for a small fee (or was it free?). This was absolutely revolutionary in 2002, when Spotify, etc. didn't exist, so if you wanted to obtain large quantities of licensed music for free, this was basically one of the best ways to do it. I guess Ctrax came so early at the beginning of the "de-DRMing" of the music industry because college students were among the most egregious music pirates, so getting money out of the university and/or the students is better than getting $0 out of them. ... But you couldn't transfer the files between machines; you couldn't convert them to MP3s; you couldn't listen to them in other media players; you couldn't apply pitch shifting (and the EQ sucked); you couldn't transfer them to a mobile device; you couldn't back them up; and you'd lose access to them when your subscription to Ctrax expired.
In other words, the company didn't trust its users, so they imposed arbitrary restrictions on users, and used your own computer hardware against you to enforce those restrictions.
And I complained - loudly - about this in philosophical discussions in Computer Science courses. But of course everyone laughed at me for being silly about restricted music downloads because it's only a minor inconvenience, and I should be happy to have access to that much music anyway.
Well, we gave them an inch, and now they've taken every mile of the surface of the Earth. Good job, guys.
"The Guardian, citing many industry experts, reminds us that these technologies filter who and what counts..."
The Guardian has been an unreliable rag since GCHQ made them smash up their hard-drives after the Snowden disclosures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Any worthwhile filter would have excluded crap written by Luke Harding and Polly Toynbee.
USB, USB, USB!
Because humans are notoriously inaccurate and biased when it comes to making judgments. If we could rely on people to make perfect, rational decisions constantly, there would be no:
The problem isn't humans making bad judgments it is the runaway aggregation of power and people choosing to maximally leveraging their position by using technology against others in ways that asymmetrically alter the rules of the game in their favor.
- Market bubbles and crashes;
This is rank nonsense. Computers will do what they are instructed to do. They will not ever be programmed to act in ways which interfere with the objective function of their owners. Players don't give a shit about bubbles and crashes they only care about making money. There are numerous well known examples of computers causing market crashes.
- Racism; Sexism; Most other nasty prejudiced and bigoted behavior;
Did you even RTFA?
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
- negligence;
This is a word game. Computers can't be negligent and more than a brick can be negligent.
People are emotional, irrational, and panicky, and make decisions that they *think* are rational all the time, but which actually turn out to be irrational, sub-optimal decisions. Study after study has found that "actuarial" judgement (e.g., classification and decision making based on statistical models) routinely outperforms "clinical" judgement (e.g., expert interpretation of the facts resulting in a decision about how to proceed).
That said, though, it's not a very controversial statement to say that statistical models are, generally, better at making decisions than "experts." Even REALLY EXPERT experts.
And that's why the fuck you would outsource judgement.
The true objective function is rarely obvious in the real world. Computers have a proven track record of being suckered by bad data and getting stuck in locally optimal ruts. The proper use of DSS is context dependent. Your sweeping generalizations are in fact worthless.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are increasingly moving to a world where many decisions around us are shaped by calculations rather than traditional human judgement.
Isn't the point of AI to be indiscernible from traditional human judgement? When it's not, can we please stop calling that AI? It's just a decision made by a computer with a certain set of inputs.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'm a little surprised at the dismissive response to this.
We already see this happening, as Google shows less high-paying jobs to women.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/08/women-less-likely-ads-high-paid-jobs-google-study
A recent book that dives into these issues is "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neill.
www.goodreads.com/book/show/28186015-weapons-of-math-destruction