Frank Pasquale – Black Box Society – chapter 1 (pp 1-11)
Cathy O’Neill – The era of blind faith in big data must end (Ted Talk, 13m)
O’Neill talks about how there are clear winners and losers determined by algorithms that we have “blind faith” in. We train these algorithms to figure out what leads to success. I thought it was interesting how she related algorithms to “opinions embedded in code”, which leads to the idea that algorithms are biased, which is why it’s very problematic to blindly believe in data and algorithms. People don’t try to understand the algorithm because it’s “math” and most people “won’t want to understand it/won’t be able to understand it”. It’s kind of scary to me how she talks about algorithms being silently dangerous, making me think of how many algorithms that exist today that are super biased and dangerous. What would the world be like if we just removed computer algorithms?
Virginia Eubanks – Automating Inequality (talk, 45m)
Eubanks talks about studying inequality through data. She talks about how the solution to alleviate this kind of inequality was to build a bunch of public poorhouses that required to give up their established rights in the 1820s. (Right to vote, office, marriage, family integrity) because “poor children can be rehabilitated by interacting with wealthy”. This didn’t really work, people kept dying. She was talking about a feedback loop of inequality which I feel like I discussed a bit in the reading last week. I don’t think that a world without inequality exists.
Janet Vertesi – My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data… (Time, short article)
This article discusses Vertesi’s experiment to try to avoid cookies/tracking data because she was a pregnant woman. I found it super interesting how she said that a single pregnant woman is SUPER valuable, and worth 200 people because they have so much buying power and are so vulnerable to advertisements. She had to do several things like not shop at certain places and delete certain friends on Facebook, making her seem and look like she was doing illicit activities. I thought this was super interesting cause it says something about how we as a society value convenience and are willing to give up a lot of freedoms and buy into big data to make our lives easier, without really thinking too much about the consequences. It almost feels like people are trying to make our lives hard if we don’t partake in it.
Walliams and Lucas – The Computer Says No (comedy skit, 2m)
This skit shows a mother and child going to a doctors office so the daughter can have an operation. The receptionist asks super simple questions and only accepts straight answers, but the mother and child give relative-ish answers. Taking that into account with the title it made me think that this is the way people interact with computers, filling out forms, because computers only take a certain kind of answer in a specific format.