An algorithm is just some person’s will made manifest. So the key question is: “whose will?” Yours? Or some douchebag billionaire’s?
@jonas This :)
@aral algorithms are social, but yes they are also about power and in capitalism it's individualised to greed...
What dues social power look like http://hamishcampbell.com/2022/05/04/real-social-change-needs-shared-storys/
@aral could be the will of a committee 😏
@aral I'm afraid the answer is, "some douchebag programmer who wants to be a billionaire at 30”.
@aral And with Deep Learning, enforcing discrimination becomes easier than ever before.
You don't even have to spell it out.
Just have less people of a certain skin color in your data set.
Or train your human resources AI using your existing staff.
@aral Or even explicitely encode an (adversarial) setup in it¹.
@aral maybe slightly tenuous connection, but this is one big part of why I was always very suspicious of crypto bros' whole "code is law" BS. Because who exactly do they think will be engineering the smart contracts if the tech goes mainstream? Do they really think they're going to get some kind of early adopter veto right so that actually *they* will have power over the billionaires and giant corporations?