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January 21, 2019: Prof. Safiya Noble, author, "Algorithms of Oppression"

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This week: Prof. Safiya Noble, author, "Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism"

Safiya Noble online:

• Buy her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (via your local non-monopoly bookstore!)

• Author site: safiyaunoble.com

• Book site: algorithmsofoppression.com

• Twitter: @safiyanoble

Topical articles:

• ‘Colorblind’ Artificial Intelligence Just Reproduces Racism (Jan 16, HuffPo): "Discrimination doesn’t have to be deliberate or even conscious in order to be harmful. . . . If we simply add AI technology on top of unjust social systems, without considering how they automate and speed up those very same systems, we only make injustice run more smoothly."

• The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence (Julia Powles, Dec 2018): "Addressing bias as a computational problem obscures its root causes. Bias is a social problem, and seeking to solve it within the logic of automation is always going to be inadequate. . . . [furthermore] the seductive controversy of A.I. bias, and the false allure of 'solving' it, detracts from bigger, more pressing questions."

• Google's Algorithm Isn't Biased, It's Just Not Human (WIRED, Dec 14, 2018): "Engagement is central to Google’s bottom line, and the company certainly isn’t the first to discover that screaming and vitriol keep an audience’s attention. . . . Everything was fine until Google felt compelled to grow and apply its magic formula to politics and news. In those areas, its algorithm worked in reverse. Instead of finding order beneath the chaos, it sowed chaos where there had been a modicum of order."

Precedent (i.e., why all of us should pay attention):

• Lessons from history on the dangers of blind trust in data (FT, Dec 2018, behind a paywall): "Our obsession with measuring everything, from school grades, to personal looks, to behavioural habits, to popularity is creating a new social order of worth, a 'conform and perform' culture, a world of 'credible fictions'. Statistics are not just reflective of the existing world but are constructing an alternative new reality. Data are not just being used to inform society but to form it."

• Citizenship v. The Surveillance State (Boston Review, Dec 2018): "This is not some distant dystopia: predictive analytics are already being used by police departments in major urban centers, notably in Chicago. This data, unsurprisingly, tends to target poor and black neighborhoods, with young black men having reported cases where police knocked on their doors to warn them off doing things the police believed they were about to do — in effect persecuting them for precrimes, to borrow Philip K. Dick’s term."

• Our dystopian cyberpunk here and now (Jan 13, TechCrunch): "'Installing cameras in some people’s homes.' 'Officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.' Targeting 'people who have received a phone call from overseas.' Why the crackdown [in Xinjiang, China]? . . . Partly because they can: because this dystopian surveillance police-state technology is now cheap enough and reliable enough to roll out at massive scale."

• Your Face Tomorrow (Art in America, Jan 1), on Chinese surveillance: "In the last few years, businesses, schools, and private individuals [in China] have begun streaming their closed-circuit camera footage onto websites for anyone to see. While it’s not unusual to store video footage on internet servers, China appears to lead the way when it comes to the amount of footage that is publicly accessible, perhaps because of the country’s looser norms around individual privacy and copyright."

......(for a happier post from China, here's a school principal's dance routine.)

• Twins get some 'mystifying' results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test (CBC, Jan 18): "Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis. Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies. . . . Paul Maier, chief geneticist at FamilyTreeDNA, admits it's 'kind of a science and an art.'"

...responding to the above, Cornell professor Ifeoma Ajunwa writes, "While this might be hilarious, it’s also dangerous. People blindly rely on genetic tests as accurate predictors of health and propensity for disease. Implications for employment and insurance."

Finally, in recent tech news...

• Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just A Harmless Meme—Right? (WIRED, Jan 15): "It's tough to overstate the fullness of how technology stands to impact humanity. The opportunity exists for us to make it better, but to do that we also must recognize some of the ways in which it can get worse. Once we understand the issues, it’s up to all of us to weigh in."


by David Golumbia, Jan 16

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