Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control The World Around Us
In 2012, Target figured out that a teen girl was pregnant before her father did. How? because they have your personal details and consumption pattern and they can data-mine its way into your womb. Same year Orbitz started showing higher prices to the mac users for the same room because algorithms were judging you and deciding what price you can pay ( People who use Mac are richer).
Machine learning algorithms are already doing everything from sorting cucumbers to curing cancers. But before we talk about the future, I’d like to look back. We’ve come a long way without realizing that financial industry has been using approach for a while. Do you monitor your credit score? Is it reliable and accurate? Ever tried to understand how it works? Chances are no. The way intelligence is gathered by these agencies we have no ideas. What categories and classifications are used? We don’t know but collateral consequences are huge.
Continuing use of such scores and bets are not documented but we are still getting scored and ranked by these data driven black-box algorithms. Government and technology giant’s interest in data intelligence gathering is quite evident, and their secret partnerships with each others are not good to the end consumer but highly profitable for their own financial success.
That was the beginning of black box society. Everybody got ranked based on something with some data mining intelligence that is complex enough, also bound to protect company trade secrets. Technology giants are collecting all kinds of data about us and this surveillance capitalism is creating another layer of secrecy. They have access to our data vaults only to create unequal economics against us. We will become more vulnerable with this transparent digital citizenship while government and technology giants will get more opaqueness.
Search Engines Are Not Truth Engines
Google is just a search engine. But you reveal so much that they know more about you than you yourself. It says it uses your information to “make ads relevant” while you’re browsing the web. But this creates invisible power that they know what everybody does. There is no Exit, It never worked with earlier in the world of financial privacy, and now we are dependent on these tech companies for our survival (yes, it seems so). If nothing is done against these faceless algorithms we all will become victims of technology bias.
Better user experience is a regular excuse for using your and manipulating your personal data. But these technologies are so complex and their dominance is so great that transparency and accountability is nowhere visible to the public. Google is the “Universal Index” for all the world’s information. We have given them this immense godly powers that if some business chose to de-index their website that business will lose significant revenue next fortnight.
Efficiencies and speed of Google algorithms are due to many automated processes and any human intervention would likely to slow down the process. Google is committed to present information based on math, rules and facts –not on opinions, values or judgements. Just as you can’t sue a phone company for enabling a person to spread lies over their phone network similarly Google and such companies protect their arguments.
Big Data and Matthew Effect:
The Gospel of St Matthew states: ‘For to all those who have, more will be given’ (Matthew 25:29).
Large quantities of our data that belongs to Google, Facebook and others, is further used to train their new algorithms to make faster, better and money making black-boxes. As long as this is not being shared outside there is no competition to these technology giants. This undermines the competition spirit and nothing stops them from using our data. All this will make them stronger, and legal or regulatory responses to such future problem are either absent or inadequate.
The dramatic rise of data in today’s society has infiltrated everything. Every company out there is desperate to grab our attention.
Yoshua Bengio, computer scientist specializing in AI, once said that
“as soon as you have a complicated enough machine, it becomes almost impossible to completely explain what it does”
Early Intervention, Proactive Policing and Turing Cathedral
You can’t have a trusting relationship with a black-box. Automation-bias can’t be ignored and nothing can’t be fixed unless we groom various digital versions of ourselves, and we know transparently what others know about us. Biggest danger comes when this black-box secrecy becomes business strategy, and under the veil of technical complexity and trade secrets these companies hide their anticompetitive and biased objectives.
Digital aristocracy can be seen in proactive policing where criminal activities can be predicted by algorithms and police can arrest people, Why? “Because, the computer said so”. Letting data speak for themselves can be dangerous. Here police can just see if the system works, but police cannot see how the system works. Using arrests or drug convictions will almost certainly produce racially biased results because algorithms learn from the data that was fed to them. Algorithms will just replicate racial biases that is hidden in coders and data agencies.
The digital computer and the hydrogen bomb — emerged at the same time. Now, code is taking over the world and soon Google might become the third half of our brain. Stakes are way too high for us and we should not ignore this new reality that economy’s biggest winners now have immense power due to black box technologies of search and reputations.
Summing It Up
But remember that data is just a mirror, and what you see out there is your own reflection that you must first see inside of you. May be it is our problem we can’t stay away our mobile phones.
The need to anticipate what that new notification on our mobile phone brings is so significant, we fall victim to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and forget what’s next on our to-do list.
I must stop writing this article now someone just shared a cute cat video.
