‘Computer says no’: algorithms, ideology and inequality
View this post on Hive: ‘Computer says no’: algorithms, ideology and inequality
I've moved to Hive, along with most other people, following Justin Sun's takeover of Steem in the Spring of 2020. I believe hive is a lot more decentralised than Steem!
This is an important topic and ties into crypto as well. It would be possible to put data in the hands of the people that it is about and let them fine tune the level of granularity at which they share it and metadata about it using cryptography. Since data is such a valuable resource, the public shouldn't be forced to divulge it for free or at all if they don't want to.
You're absolutely right in that there are many questionable ways in which data are gathered on people and used against them. The child abuse risk model is a prime example. Assessing child abuse or the possibility thereof is such a subjective matter that it is hard to completely trust the process by which people do it, particularly when certain families are branded as being at risk by an algorithm they very understand vaguely at best. Any family can be found at fault if scrutinized closely enough.
Child abuse takes place and checking kids out by the healthcare system is understandably a necessity. But when I compare how things have changed in this regard since I was a kid (I have a ten-year-old daughter), the prevailing ethos seems to have changed from common sense to population-wide screening and suspicion. When my daughter started school, all the parents were given a questionnaire before a doctor's examination at the school clinic that asked very detailed questions about our private lives that appeared to be for some kind of a statistical risk assessment model. I heard some parents chuckle at some of the questions. We had had to move a couple of years prior to that because of my wife's work and she'd had some kids bully her around the time she started school. We'd moved another time right before our daughter's school started because we wanted to move to a better area and because we were better able to afford it at the time. I was at the examination with my daughter and at one point the doctor questioned our moving and I had to defend our decision by telling him that vacant jobs in my wife's field were few and far between in the area we moved from. I don't know what sort of information my daughter's teacher had told the teacher. Otherwise it was a pleasant conversation but it felt odd at one point.
All first world countries, at least in the West, seem keen on implementing many types of mass surveillance of their populations. It is starting to feel somewhat unpleasant. And continental Europe, particularly the Nordic countries, are generally much less paranoid about child safety than the Anglosphere, particularly North America (and perhaps Australia, too). Kids walk to school alone from first grade on unlike the USA. In Illinois, it is in fact illegal to leave children home alone until they turn 14. That's patently absurd because the same kids will be allowed to drive a car when 16. But the same type of thinking of parenting as a profession spearheaded by Americans seems to be spreading here, too. In those first-world countries without mass immigration or religiosity keeping birth rates up, they have been plummeting in particularly in the last 5-10 years. I suspect a lot of people on the fence about becoming parents in the first place or considering having a second or a third child have decided against it because the standards for good parenting have been creeping up all the time. In a modern society, particularly when the middle class is having less job security than in past decades, not having children is increasingly the rational choice as people know that being poor makes them suspect even as parents.
Thanks for the detailed comment.
I'm just glad I don't want kids... they do seem to open the door to more state surveillance.
I think Britain is worse than most xountries in Europe for the things you mention - so much surveillance but then so many cock-ups too (sure you've heard of the Rotherham case).
The US is probably a step up, at least for the poor.
Here in the uk there are so many measures of child development yr kid will always fail at something.... friend of mine's got a 'gifted' kid - he was told he had problems relating to other children - actually he was just bored because he was so far ahead of them all.
Data does seem to be used in more and more oppressive ways.
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I feel there's a kind of naivity about some of these approaches which seem like a good idea. As part of a health and social care masters we were looking at mass screening of patient data. Several problems:
@roused wrote a post yesterday about fachidiots. Between these, neoliberal policies and unconscious bias, some groups of people are completely stuffed.
Thanks for sharing the book.
I've heard about the first one of those... and the other two don't surprise me.
I can imagine that masters degree is depressing and enlightening at the same time.
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It was a bit of a struggle.
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