I didn’t just buy a sous-vide circulator, I also bought what could very likely turn into a new zombie member of a botnet nobody knows about yet. (A botnet, to refresh your memory, is a group of many disparate internet-enabled computers whose security has been remotely compromised, enabling hackers to network them together and use their combined power for nefarious purposes.)
I do not actually know that my sous-vide circulator will be hacked remotely in order to power a Low Orbit Ion Cannon (popular software for launching a distributed denial-of-service attack used to take websites off the internet temporarily), but if it did happen, I would not be surprised. Oftentimes, the computers — usually very primitive computers of the kind found in security cameras, smart-home light bulbs, and cooking appliances — function normally while these processes run in the background. Perhaps my precision cooker will be attacking a major DNS server while I poach a perfect egg. Or maybe it will help take down a dissident forum as I prepare a cut of steak for the grill. The possibilities are endless.
Interesting account of author of Close to the Machine Ellen Ullman’s most recent book Life in Code, which sounds fantastic and very much worth a read (just like Close to the Machine), and something of its context. From the NYT:
As milestone years go, 1997 was a pretty good one. The computers may have been mostly beige and balky, but certain developments were destined to pay off down the road. Steve Jobs returned to a floundering Apple after years of corporate exile, IBM’s Deep Blue computer finally nailed the world-champion chess master Garry Kasparov with a checkmate, and a couple of Stanford students registered the domain name for a new website called google.com. Nineteen ninety-seven also happened to be the year that the software engineer Ellen Ullman published “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents,” her first book about working as a programmer in a massively male-dominated field.
That slender volume became a classic of 20th-century digital culture literature and was critically praised for its sharp look at the industry, presented in a literary voice that ignored the biz-whiz braggadocio of the early dot-com era. The book had obvious appeal to technically inclined women — desktop-support people like myself then, computer-science majors, admirers of Donna J. Haraway’s feminist cyborg manifesto, those finding work in the newish world of website building — and served as a reminder that someone had already been through it all and took notes for the future.
Then Ullman retired as a programmer, logging out to go write two intense character-driven thriller novels and the occasional nonfiction essay. The digital economy bounced back after the Epic Fail of 2000 and two decades later, those techno-seeds planted back in 1997 have bloomed. Just look at all those smartphones, constantly buzzing with news alerts and calendar notifications as we tell the virtual assistant to find us Google Maps directions to the new rice-bowl place. What would Ullman think of all this? We can now find out, as she’s written a new book, “Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology,” which manages to feel like both a prequel and a sequel to her first book.
In 2015, former Google and Uber engineer, Anthony Levandowski, founded a nonprofit called Way of the Future in order to develop an AI god and promote its worship. The mission statement reads as follows: “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”
Smart cities and the role of Internet of Things technologies in public space. How to understand these new human-technology relationships, and how to connect philosophical and ethical analysis to practices of urban planning, design and policymaking? Building on the theory of technological mediation, the lecture will investigate how technologies can contribute to the quality of life of (urban) citizens, create new political configurations, and require new forms of citizenship. We need to broaden the perspectives from which we look at the influence of the digital domain on the analogue city and bring ethical considerations to the center of the smart city and citizens debate. The event takes place at BOZAR (Ravensteinstraat 23, 1000 Brussel). It is a co-production of the Free University of Brussels with Brussels Academy and BOZAR Agora. More information: https://www.vub.ac.be/events/2017/peter-paul-verbeek-smart-cities-and-citizens-a-question-of-technology
On his new website, Paul Simpson (Ass. Prof. in Geography at Plymouth) is blogging about the writing process of a new book. Part of the “Key Ideas” series for Routledge, Paul is writing Nonrepresentational Theory. The book is due at the end of 2018, so I guess/hope there may be a quite a few blogposts to come. It’s great to see someone other than the “usual [prolific] suspects” doing this and I look forward to following the process in Paul’s blogposts. The first two posts about the book are here: “NRT book post 1“, “NRT book post 2“.
I hope you stick with it Paul! 🙂
It is interesting to see a colleague recommence blogging, because, recently, it feels like it’s been on the decline… part of my motivation to have a break from Twitter is to try and refocus on this blog, which I’ve always found more interesting and ocassionally, rewarding. Although, as is evident if you browse through, it remains largely a case of me writing with little in the way of interaction from any readers, whoever they may be.
If I ever write anything longer than a journal article, I’ll do my best to commit to blogging about it here. But that’s by the by, check out Paul’s blog.
Some videos have been widely shared concerning the soap dispensers and taps in various public or restaurant toilets that appear to have been calibrated to work with light skin colour and so subsequently appear to not work with darker skin. See the below for a couple of example videos.
If you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech and its impact on society, watch this video pic.twitter.com/ZJ1Je1C4NW
Of course, there are (depressingly) all sorts of examples of technologies being calibrated to favour people who conform to a white racial appearance, from the Kodak’s “Shirley” calibration cards, to Nikon’s “Did someone blink?” filter, to HP’s webcam face tracking software. There are unfortunately more examples, which I won’t list here, but to suffice it to say this demonstrates an important aspect of artefactual and technological politics – things often carry the political assumptions of their designers. Even if this was an ‘innocent’ mistake such as a result of a manufacturing error, skewing the calibration etc., it demonstrates the sense in which there remains a politics to the artefact/technology in question because the agency of the object remains skewed along lines of difference.
There are perhaps two sides to this politics, if we resurrect Langdon Winner’s (1980) well-known argument about artefactual politics and the resulting discussion. First, like the well-known story (cited by Winner, gleaned from Caro) of Robert Moses’ New York bridges: “someone wills a specific social state, and then subtly transfers this vision into an artefact” (Joerges 1999: p. 412). What Joerges (1999) calls the design-led version of ‘artefacts-have-politics’, following Winner (I am not condoning Joerges’ rather narrow reading of Winner, just using a useful short-hand).
Second, following Winner, artefacts can have politics by virtue of the kinds of economic, political social (and so on) systems upon which they are predicated. There is the way in which such a deliberate or mistaken development, such as the tap sensor, is facilitated or at the least tolerated by virtue of the kinds of standards that are used to govern the design, manufacture and sale or implementation of a given artefact/technology. So, the fact that a bridge that apparently excludes particular groups on people by virtue of preventing their most likely means of travel, a bus, to pass under it, or a tap only works with lighter skin colour, can pass into circulation, or socialisation perhaps, by virtue of normative and bureaucratic frameworks of governance.
In this sense, and again following Winner, we might think about the ways these outcomes transcend “the simple categories of ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ altogether”. Rather, they represent “instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others” (Winner 1980: p. 125-6)
So, even when considered the results of error, and especially when the mechanism for regulating such errors is considered to be ‘the market’—with the expectation that if the thing doesn’t work it won’t sell and the manufacturer will be forced to change it—the assumptions behind the rectification of the ‘error’ carry a politics too (perhaps in the sense of Weber’s loaded value judgements).
Third, there is the what Woolgar (1991 – in a critical response to Winner) calls the ‘contingent and contestable versions of the capacity of various technologies’, which might include the ‘manufacturing mistakes’ but would also include the videos produced and their support or contestation through responses in other videos and in media coverage.
This analysis might become further complicated by widening our consideration of the ways in which contingencies render a given artefact/ technology political.
Take, for example, an ‘Internet of Things’ device that might seem innocuous, such as a ‘smart thermostat’ that ‘learns’ when you use the heating and begins to automatically schedule your heating. There are immediate technical issues that might render such a device political, such as in terms of the strength of the security settings, and so whether or not it could be hacked and whether or not you as the ‘owner’ of the device would know and what you may be able to do in response.
Further, there are privacy issues if the ‘smart’ element is actually not embedded in the device but enabled through remote services ‘in the cloud’, do you know where your data is, how it is being used, does it identify you? etc. etc. Further still, the device might appear to be a one-off expense but may actually require a further payment or subscription to work in the way you expected. For example, I bought an Amazon Kindle that had advertising as the ‘screen saver’ and I had to pay an additional £10 to remove it.
Even further, it may be that even if the security, privacy and payment systems are all within the bounds of what one might consider to be politically or ethically acceptable, it may still be that there are political contingencies that exclude or disproportionately effect particular groups of people. The thermostat might only work with particular boilers or may require a ‘smart’ meter, so it may also only work with particular energy subscription plans. Such plans, even if they’re no more expensive might require good credit ratings to access them or other pre-conditions, which are not immediately obvious. Likewise, the thermostat may not work with pre-payment meter-driven systems, which necessarily disadvantages those without a choice – renting for example.
The thermostat may require a particular kind of smart phone to access its functionality, which again may require particular kinds of phone contract and these may require credit ratings and so on. The manufacturer of the thermostat might cease to trade, or get bought out, and the ‘smart’ software ‘in the cloud’ may cease to function – you may therefore find yourself without a thermostat. If the thermostat was installed in a ‘vulnerable’ person’s home in order to enable remote monitoring by concerned family members this might create anxiety and risk.
As apparently individual, or discrete, artefacts/technologies become apparently more entangled in sociotechnical systems of use (as Kline says) with concomitant contingencies the politics of these things has the potential to become more opaque.
So, all artefacts have politics and the examples within this post might be considered useful if troubling contemporary examples for discussion in research projects and in the classroom (as well as, one might hope, the committee rooms of regulators, or parliaments).
P.S. I think this now is a chunk of a lecture rewritten for my “Geographies of Technology” module at Exeter, heh.
Another excellent, recent, episode of John Danaher’s podcast. In a wide-ranging discussion of blockchain technologies with Angela Walch there’s lots of really useful explorations of some of the confusing (to me anyway) aspects of what is meant by ‘blockchain’.
In this episode I am joined by Angela Walch. Angela is an Associate Professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law. Her research focuses on money and the law, blockchain technologies, governance of emerging technologies and financial stability. She is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies of University College London. Angela was nominated for “Blockchain Person of the Year” for 2016 by Crypto Coins News for her work on the governance of blockchain technologies. She joins me for a conversation about the misleading terms used to describe blockchain technologies.
You can download the episode here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Show Notes
0:00 – Introduction
2:06 – What is a blockchain?
6:15 – Is the blockchain distributed or shared?
7:57 – What’s the difference between a public and private blockchain?
11:20 – What’s the relationship between blockchains and currencies?
18:43 – What is miner? What’s the difference between a full node and a partial node?
22:25 – Why is there so much confusion associated with blockchains?
29:50 – Should we regulate blockchain technologies?
36:00 – The problems of inconsistency and perverse innovation
Thanks to dmf for sharing this. Roy Ascott was a formative influence for me, via Mike Phillips & Chris Speed and the CAiiA+STAR (Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts [Wales] and Science, Technology + Arts Research [Plymouth]) crew, some of whom constituted the institute for Digital Art & Technology at Plymouth which ran the Bachelors course I took, the wonderful BSc MediaLab Arts (for a flavour see this characteristically [1990s] low-res video of a student show). I still have a copy of a Reframing Consciousness book on my shelf that I ‘borrowed’ from Mike in about 2001… and I basically became a geographer because of Chris, especially his piece Spacelapse.
Marxist feminists went a long way towards demystifying the so-called “private” practices, relations, and institutions.
…let me offer a crude but I think useful distinction between two periods of Marxist feminist work, one past and one present.
First the past. In the 1970s, Anglo-American Marxist feminists focused on mapping the relationship bewteen two systems of domination: capitalism and patriarchy. One could characterize this phase as the attempt to bring a Marxist critique of work into the field of domestic labor and the familial relations of production. By examining domestic based caring work, housework, consumption work, and community-creation work as forms of reproductive labor upon which productive labor more narrowly conceived depends, and by viewing the household as a workplace and the family as a regime that organizes, distributes and manages that labor, Marxist feminists went a long way towards demystifying these so-called “private” practices, relations, and institutions. On the one hand, they were concerned with the theoretical question of how to understand the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy: were they best conceived as two related systems or as one fully intertwined system? On the the other hand, they were also focused on the closely related practical question of alliances: should feminist groups be autonomous from or integrated with other anticapitalist (and often antifeminist) movements?
Today we find ourselves in a different situation that holds new possibilities for the relationship between Marxism and feminism. Whereas 1970s feminists struggled to bring a Marxist analytic tailored to the study of waged labor to a very different kind of unwaged laboring practice that had not been considered part of capitalist production, today I think that in order to grasp new forms of waged work we need to draw on the older feminist analyses of waged and unwaged “women’s work.”
Some describe the present moment in terms of the “feminization of labor.” It’s not my favorite term, but what I understand by it is a way to describe how in neoliberal post-Fordist economies more and more of waged jobs come to resemble traditional forms of feminized domestic work. This is particularly evident in the rise of precarious forms of low-wage, part-time, informal, and insecure forms of employment, and in the growth of service sector jobs that draw on workers’ emotional, caring, and communicative capacities that are undervalued and difficult to measure.
Feminist theory is no longer only optional for Marxist critique.
To confront this changing landscape of work, instead of using an unreconstructed Marxist analytic to study unwaged forms of domestic work, we need today to draw on Marxist feminist analyses of gendered forms of both waged and unwaged work for their insights into how these forms are exploited and how they are experienced. The practical implication of this is that, if we want to both understand and resist contemporary forms of exploitation, Marxists can no longer remain ignorant of or separated from feminist theories and practices. As I see it, feminist theory is no longer optional for Marxist critique.
We seek participants for a National Science Foundation sponsored workshop on December 4-5, 2017 to work together to better understand algorithms that are currently being used to make decisions for and about people, and how those algorithms and decisions can be made more trustworthy. We invite interested scholars to submit whitepapers of no more than 2 pages (excluding references); attendees will be invited based on whitepaper submissions. Meals and travel expenses will be provided.
Online algorithms, often based on data-driven machine-learning approaches, are increasingly being used to make decisions for and about people in society. One very prominent example is the Facebook News Feed algorithm that ranks posts and stories for each person, and effectively prioritizes what news and information that person sees. Police are using “predictive policing” algorithms to choose where to patrol, and courts are using algorithms that predict the likelihood of repeat offending in sentencing. Face recognition algorithms are being implemented in airports in lieu of ID checks. Both Uber and Amazon use algorithms to set and adjust prices. Waymo/Google’s self-driving cars are using Google maps not just as a suggestion, but to actually make route choices.
As these algorithms become more integrated into people’s lives, they have the potential to have increasingly large impacts. However, if these algorithms cannot be trusted to perform fairly and without undue influences, then there may be some very bad unintentional effects. For example, some computer vision algorithms have mis-labeled African Americans as “gorillas”, and some likelihood of repeat offending algorithms have been shown to be racially biased. Many organizations employ “search engine optimization” techniques to alter the outcomes of search algorithms, and “social media optimization” to improve the ranking of their content on social media.
Researching and improving the trustworthiness of algorithmic decision-making will require a diverse set of skills and approaches. We look to involve participants from multiple sectors (academia, industry, government, popular scholarship) and from multiple intellectual and methodological approaches (computational, quantitative, qualitative, legal, social, critical, ethical, humanistic).
Whitepapers
To help get the conversation started and to get new ideas into the workshop, we solicit whitepapers of no more than two pages in length that describe an important aspect of trustworthy algorithmic decision-making. These whitepapers can motivate specific questions that need more research; they can describe an approach to part of the problem that is particularly interesting or likely to help make progress; or they can describe a case study of a specific instance in the world of algorithmic decision-making and the issues or challenges that case brings up.
Some questions that these whitepapers can address include (but are not limited to):
What does it mean for an algorithm to be trustworthy?
What outcomes, goals, or metrics should be applied to algorithms and algorithm-made decisions (beyond classic machine-learning accuracy metrics)?
What does it mean for an algorithm to be fair? Are there multiple perspectives on this?
What threat models are appropriate for studying algorithms? For algorithm-made decisions?
What are ways we can study data-driven algorithms when researchers don’t always have access to the algorithms or to the data, and when the data is constantly changing?
Should algorithms that make recommendations be held to different standards than algorithms that make decisions? Should filtering algorithms have different standards than ranking or prioritization algorithms?
When systems use algorithms to make decisions, are there ways to institute checks and balances on those decisions? Should we automate those?
Does transparency really achieve trustworthiness? What are alternative approaches to trusting algorithms and algorithm-made decisions?
Please submit white papers along with a CV or current webpage by October 9, 2017 via email to trustworthy-algorithms@bitlab.cas.msu.edu. We plan to post whitepapers publicly on the workshop website (with authors’ permission) to facilitate conversation ahead of, at, and after the workshop. More information about the workshop can be found at http://trustworthy-algorithms.org.
We have limited funding for PhD students interested in these topics to attend the workshop. Interested students should also submit a whitepaper with a brief description of their research interests and thoughts on these topics, and indicate in their email that they are PhD students.
