Tag Archives: Technology

Algorithms are like invisible judges that decide our fates

April 27, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Computing, Dave Bry, Dave Bry column, Opinion, Privacy, Science, Silicon Valley, Technology, US work & careersdiana Stone

This worry’s me, but certainly does not surprise me. We are all playing a game which where the winners and losers are all ready selected before they have even decided to play. I am not comfortable at all with this: though at my time in life its unlikely to effect me directly, it is part of a growing trend which ends in exclusion for certain people from what is considered normal society. This is a bad thing

This article titled “Algorithms are like invisible judges that decide our fates” was written by Dave Bry, for theguardian.com on Monday 27th April 2015 09.00 UTC

Imagine that you’re a contestant in an audition round of The Voice, where you belt out your best “I Will Always Love You”. A minute passes. No reaction from the celebrity judges. You keep singing. Another minute, still no encouraging smile or nod. You strain to hit your highest note, pleading with your performance: “Please, please accept me! I am doing my best!” The song ends. No one wants you. Your family bow their heads in shame. Your mom cries. You stand on the stage, alone in the spotlight, heartbroken. A trap door opens beneath your feet and you slide screaming into Adam Levine’s basement torture maze.

Think that’s bad? In the real world, science has come up with something worse. A company called Jobaline offers “voice profiling” to predict job success based on how candidates sound; its algorithm identifies and analyzes over one thousand vocal characteristics by which it categorizes job applicants on suitability.

It’s horrible and dehumanizing, like all our other profiling (the racial kind is always a big hit!) Reliant on born-in, luck-of-the-genetic-draw factors that we can neither avoid or control. Regardless of mood or intent, according to NPR’s Aaarti Shehani, “your voice has a hidden, complicated architecture with an intrinsic signature – much like a fingerprint”.

This is not the only creepy algorithm system HR departments have been employing to help the company bottom line. Companies like Wal-Mart and Credit Suisse have been crunching data to predict which employees are “flight risks” who are likely to quit (easily remedied with a simple anklet attaching the worker to his or her cash register or cubicle) vs those deemed “sticky,” meaning in-it-for-the-long-haul. The information lets bosses either improve morale or get a head-start on a search for a replacement.

The inventors of such programs often enjoy the impeachable, amoral cloak of scientific legitimacy. When it comes to voice profiling, computers are not judging the speakers themselves; only the reactions the speaker’s voice provokes in other (presumably human) listeners. “The algorithm functions as a mechanical judge in a voice-based beauty contest”, wrote Chamorro-Premuzic and Adler in The Harvard Business Review. “Desirable voices are invited to the next round, where they are judged by humans, while undesirable voices are eliminated from the contest”.

The makers of voice profiling programs tout this as a moral achievement. Human beings bring loads of biases into any evaluation; computers are blissfully unaware of differences in race, gender, sexual preference or age. “That’s the beauty of math!” Jobaline CEO Luis Salazar told NPR. “It’s blind.”

The problem is, when applied in a capitalist system already plagued by unfairness and inhumanity, this blindness sounds really, really dangerous. An impersonal computer program gets first say as to who gets to earn money to buy food and who doesn’t, based on an application of a binary code too subtle and complex for us to understand. Over a thousand factors, analyzed for every vocal sample. Over a thousand ones or zeros clicked in the corresponding click boxes. Who checks for the glitch? Who do you complain to if you think you’re getting a raw deal? Is it just me or does technology like this simply pass our penchant for prejudice on to the machines who will soon wrest planetary control from our soft, carbon-based hands?

“Hello, I’d like to apply for a job,” the human being says, enunciating as clearly as possible into the phone receiver. “My name is—”

“Disqualified,” says the cold, computerized voice on the other end of the line. “Too squeaky. Perhaps you should seek work in the silent film business.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe

February 23, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Discover, Eric Schmidt, Features, Google, Internet, John Naughton, Opinion, Technology, The networker, The New Review, The Observer, US income inequality, US newsdiana Stone

I think we have always known this to be honest. Ain’t going be no trickle down from this for sure, speaking as an almost exe-tecky type.

This article titled “Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 22nd February 2015 00.05 UTC

Someone once observed that the difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher was that whereas Thatcher believed that she was always right, Blair believed not only that he was right but also that he was good. Visitors to the big technology companies in California come away with the feeling that they have been talking to tech-savvy analogues of Blair. They are fired with a zealous conviction that they are doing great stuff for the world, and proud of the fact that they work insanely hard in the furtherance of that goal. The fact that they are richly rewarded for their dedication is, one is given to believe, incidental.

The guys (and they are mostly guys) who manage these good folk are properly respectful of their high-IQ charges. Chief among them is Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he co-authored a book with his colleague Jonathan Rosenberg on the care and maintenance of these precious beings. Dr Schmidt objects to the demeaning term – “knowledge workers” – that economists have devised for them. Google employees, he tells us, are much, much more impressive than mere knowledge workers: they are “smart creatives”.

In the opinion of their chairman, these wunderkinder are very special indeed. They are “not averse to taking risks”, for example. Nor are they “punished or held back when those risky initiatives fail”. They are “not hemmed in by role definitions or organisational structures”. And “they don’t keep quiet when they disagree with something”. And so on. Altogether, they are an admirable body of men and women – mostly men (70%), admittedly, but, hey, what’s a little gender imbalance in a brave new world.

Dr Schmidt’s smart creatives work all the hours that God sends, and then some. They are, to use his term, “overworked in a good way”. The concept of work-life balance can, he thinks, “be insulting to smart, dedicated employees”, for whom work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best corporate cultures, he thinks, “invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home”.

All of which no doubt makes perfect sense if you’re running an outfit like Google. But it also highlights the extent to which our world is bifurcating into parallel universes. In one – that populated by technology companies, investment banks, hedge funds and other elite institutions – people are over-stimulated, appreciated, overworked (but in a “good way”, of course) and richly rewarded. Meanwhile, in the other universe, people are under-stimulated, overworked and poorly rewarded. And the gap between the two universes appears to be widening, not narrowing every time Moore’s Law ratchets up another notch in computing power.

Which is why we need to make a connection between what those smart creatives in California and elsewhere are creating and what is happening in the real world. In that domain, the level of economic inequality has attained staggering proportions for reasons that Thomas Piketty set out in his celebrated book Capital in the 21st Century.

Although there have been lots of detailed arguments about Piketty’s work, his central proposition – that in the absence of special circumstances such as war or redistributive taxation, the rate of return to capital exceeds the rate of return to labour – is both simple and obvious. What it means is that if your wealth involves ownership of capital assets (like company shares), then you will inexorably get richer at compound rates.

One of the oddest things about the furore surrounding Piketty’s book was that almost nobody talked about the role of technology in all this. Specifically, there was little discussion of the strange coincidence that the recent catastrophic rise in levels of inequality has coincided neatly with the digital revolution.

When you think about it, it’s clear that this isn’t just a random correlation. The digital revolution is driving inequality, not reducing it. That’s because the technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power on corporations that have mastered the technology. In the process it confers vast wealth on those who own them.

But that wealth isn’t shared with the users of the platforms operated by those corporations: most of the work that generates revenues for Facebook or Google is done by unpaid workers – you and me. And folks who work in paid occupations powered by those platforms – Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, to name just two – are not sharing in the wealth it generates for their owners either. Like Google’s smart creatives, these people are also overworked. But not in that “good way” advocated by Dr Schmidt.

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