As a member of society you are highly regulated. There are hundreds of thousands of pages outlining what is OK for you to do and what actions will get you fined or thrown into jail. This is not the case for the action of computers and in most cases for their owners either.
It will probably take a terrible disaster to make it happen, but Governments need to legislate for algorithms, the computer logic that is increasingly driving everything.
While governments are all over where we can park, the make up of the straws we sup soda through, the food chickens can eat that we are going to eat, the time the sun rises and sets, governments can be relied to show up late for the consequences of the latest tech, unless it hurts them directly.
Many would argue that it is a benefit that legislators don’t wake up to things like the internet until a generation after its invention, because they feel governments would kill a giant leap for humanity while while it was still a baby in its early adopter crib. That is a strong argument and one I would make for most things. However something has cropped up in technology that amzed me: in a bad way.
I have a Youtube channel which does quite well, it’s a side gig that may as well be secret. Its all part of my personal R&D of what is happen in tech. Youtube, which is Google, is famous for their algos that select content for you and curate video search. Google is said to be worried about the ‘bubble’ or “echo chamber” they can create with their algorithms. Google’s environment can create a situation where the content you implicitly want, is exactly the content you get and a circuit of algorithmic curation feeds-back to the user to create a self-made/google made content prison, where all your prejudices and world views are reinforced forever. You and google creates a information bubble, an echo chamber of what mental model of things, trapping you in what amounts of a algorithmically generated simulation of reality created by your prejudices.
You don’t have to be too paranoid to understand with subtle manipulation this circuit of reinforcement could be used to brainwash an audience into believing anything, one of the reasons that ‘fake news’ is such a big issue. Information algorithms can and do create irresistible ambient propaganda, many simply consider it marketing.
There is however way more to this than that.
Someone writes that algorithm, creates the machine that creates that effect, and as far as I can see, there is little to no legal or ethical input into that coding. This is where my YouTube experience caused an epiphany for me.
According you YouTube my videos are not suitable for women under 45 or men under 35.
He is a screenshot image a typical audience for one of my totally harmless videos.
This is who the Youtube algorithm allows to discover my content. It is an echo chamber for women over 45 and men over 35. The rest of the audience is shadow banned from its discovery by the algorithm. The main audience of Youtube is people younger than this and zero discover this video, while thousands over this gender and age range do get to see it. Note the videos get zero discovery, not a few.)
Is it a bug? Of course it isn’t.
Now I understand why. The algo says women under 45 arent really into my content, so we should show them other stuff. Sounds fair right?
Wrong. That is terribly illegal in both the UK and US.
Its not only sexist, its ageist too.
Try this for size. “Don’t offer that young girl an opportunity to apply for an engineering course, most girls don’t like engineering, so don’t show her that stuff, show her nutritionist courses, girls like ‘domestic science.’
That is effectively what this algo is doing and is saying ‘his video is about a old men thing, don’t show it to girls and these other gender age segmentations.
Try expressing those prejudices and applying that discrimination in the non-computing world. You would be rode out of town on a rail!
But that is exactly what YouTube algorithms are doing.
But its way worse than that.
Who is check self-driving cars software AI? If there are 3 people in a car driven by AI, destined to die in a head on, but survive if their car knocks the motorcyclist off his bike in the inside lane, what does the software do? Is anyone checking and justifying what it will do under this circumstance. What if it thinks there is a 25% chance of their being a motorcycle in the lane? Does it calculate the outcome or choose not to, when it could? What are the rules to creating an algorithm that will be responsible for the outcome. What is the accountability for the result?
When your 737 nosedives into the ground and kills you, does anyone look at the software to see if the algorithm was actually negligently designed to do that because of budget constraints?
So YouTube/google makes awfully sexist and ageist assumptions which are surely illegal. Its kind to imagine they clearly don’t even consider the implications of the algorithms they are writing because otherwise they would be conspiring to break rafts of anti-discrimination laws. You might not blame them for being sexist and ageist to optimise their income, because many girls don’t like boys’ stuff and there is more money peddling make-up at them as a group then allowing them equality of choice. That is why discrimination is so poisonous and why it has taken so much effort to slowly eradicate it. But then, there is no made for purpose framework to actually bring those social consequences into consideration so it is so much easier to follow the trail of growth and dollars than consider the consequences or have to compete with those that won’t. Interceding in this kind of situation is exactly the purpose of government and it needs to step up soon before things get even more out of control.
Other industries have their regulatorial frameworks computing need its own now as AI takes control of our lives.
When an algo trades and makes money, it made someone lose money. Is that OK? Is it OK for Apple’s Siri to castigate you for searing and ask you “does your mother kiss that mouth?” It might be small beer, but pile things like this one on top of the other and you end up with a dystopia worthy of Hollywood.
The bad outcomes of computer software are still instinctively considered accidents, but increasingly they are not.
It is not an accident that companies will discriminate against you on your age and gender not by saying no, but by giving ‘your sort’ ‘what you like.’
Operant conditioning is how you brainwash mammals. It works for dogs, dolphins and humans and that is what more and more algorithms are doing and its not an unacknowledged threat. In addition to this is the move of algorithms to simply break the law and increasingly set out to harm people.
If you don’t think this is real, play a mobile game implicitly wanting to charge you $100 a day to play and feel yourself being hooked by their ‘operant conditioning’ algorithms.
Then watch different algorithms stalk you around the internet offering you similar pleasures.
There are no, algos list of dos and donts, no Asimov ‘laws of robotics’ to protect us from programs passively or actively, acutely or chronically, designed to prey on us, judge us, categorise us, discriminate against us, hurt us, help or kill us.
In might not be the end of humanity that women under 45 are shadow banned from my treasure hunting videos, but it clearly illustrates a giant toxic undercurrent that is sweeping us along in a world where algorithms are curating what we believe, trust and rely on, in a utterly unregulated, unexamined way and barely understood way. Unchecked it is a bleak prospect.