Category Archives: Power

Algorithmic power — and bias

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

[In the 1960s] the thought that we would one day live in an “information society” that was comprehensively dependent on computers would have seemed fanciful to most people.

But that society has come to pass, and suddenly the algorithms that are the building blocks of this world have taken on a new significance because they have begun to acquire power over our everyday lives. They determine whether we can get a bank loan or a mortgage, and on what terms, for example; whether our names go on no-fly lists; and whether the local cops regard one as a potential criminal or not.

To take just one example, judges, police forces and parole officers across the US are now using a computer program to decide whether a criminal defendant is likely to reoffend or not. The basic idea is that an algorithm is likely to be more “objective” and consistent than the more subjective judgment of human officials. The algorithm in question is called Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions). When defendants are booked into jail, they respond to a Compas questionnaire and their answers are fed into the software to generate predictions of “risk of recidivism” and “risk of violent recidivism”.

It turns out that the algorithm is fairly good at predicting recidivism and less good at predicting the violent variety. So far, so good. But guess what? The algorithm is not colour blind…

Read on

Common sense on algorithmic power

Posted on by

Wonderful OpEd piece by Zeynep Tufecki on the current row about Facebook’s supposed ideological bias. I particularly like this:

With algorithms, we don’t have an engineering breakthrough that’s making life more precise, but billions of semi-savant mini-Frankensteins, often with narrow but deep expertise that we no longer understand, spitting out answers here and there to questions we can’t judge just by numbers, all under the cloak of objectivity and science.

Well worth reading in full.

Facebook can’t be just a ‘platform’ if it’s distributing news

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

Many years ago, the political theorist Steven Lukes published a seminal book – Power: A Radical View. In it, he argued that power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think. This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented. Lukes’s “third dimension” of power is what’s wielded in this country by outlets like Radio 4’s Today programme, the Sun and the Daily Mail. And this power is real: it’s why all British governments in recent years have been so frightened of the Mail.

But as our media ecosystem has changed under the impact of the internet, new power brokers have appeared….

Read on

Algorithmic power (contd)

Posted on by

“In August, Facebook was awarded a patent on using a borrower’s social network to help determine if he or she is a good credit risk. Basically, your creditworthiness becomes dependent on the creditworthiness of your friends. Associate with deadbeats, and you’re more likely to be judged as one.”

Bruce Schneier, 15 January, 2016. link

Going Dark? Dream on.

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

The Apple v FBI standoff continues to generate more heat than light, with both sides putting their case to “the court of public opinion” — which, in this case, is at best premature and at worst daft. Apple has just responded to the court injunction obliging it to help the government unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino killers with a barrage of legal arguments involving the first and fifth amendments to the US constitution. Because the law in the case is unclear (there seems to be only one recent plausible precedent and that dates from 1977), I can see the argument going all the way to the supreme court. Which is where it properly belongs, because what is at issue is a really big question: how much encryption should private companies (and individuals) be allowed to deploy in a networked world?

In the meantime, we are left with posturing by the two camps, both of which are being selective with the actualité, as Alan Clark might have said…

Read on

The other industry that is getting ‘too big to fail’

Posted on by

Apropos danah boyd’s essay, Dave Winer pitches in with an equally relevant thought:

In last night’s debate, when HRC said there’s more than one street, referring to Wall St, she was challenged. She had rattled off a list other industries that had misbehaved. But she left one out, and when we look back at this election in the future, the omission, imho, will be glaring.

Neither of them mentioned the excesses of tech. They’ve enjoyed and taken advantage of an undeserved halo, and they use that to do things other industries, including the financial industry, only dream of.

The unchallenged power of tech. The press is oblivious. Politicians are mystified. The priesthood is firmly in control. That’s going to get us in trouble in the future, probably in a much bigger way than the banks got us in trouble in 2008.

We should worry about our next President being in the pocket of tech just as much if not more than we worry about them being in the pocket of banks.

Yep.