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AR 22:17 - The looming peril of algorithmic discrimination
In this issue:
TECHNOLOGY - critiquing techno-utopians who rush down the blind alley of populating our planet until it exceeds its capacity
+ Have you experienced algorithmic discrimination yet? Plan on it.
Apologia Report 22:17 (1,337)
April 27, 2017
TECHNOLOGY
Separating from the humanist side of the biomedical frontier which we've covered in recent issues of AR, Ezekiel J. Emanuel reviews three books for the March 19 issue of New York Times Book Review (p17): The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids - and the Kids We Have, by Bonnie Rochman [1]; The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human, by Adam Piore [2]; and To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, by Mark O'Connell [3] (which AR 22:7 <www.goo.gl/1GgGr6> also featured).
Emanuel begins: "Conventional wisdom has it that science is always outrunning our ethics, that new technologies overwhelm our ability to reason ethically and regulate breakthroughs. Should we permit - or require - whole genome sequencing of every infant? Should we promote radical life extension?"
He discusses the 1975 Asilomar Conference to establish safeguards and prohibitions on the conduct of biomedical research which "stands for one of the seminal moments in history when scientists and physicians showed what one scientist called “social responsibility in the face of strong intellectual temptation” to continue experiments. In the view of many, the conference succeeded only because Berg and other organizers focused on safety.
"In subsequent years, it has become clear that safety is the only shared value that might pause the pursuit of biomedical research. Yet, as the three books under review illustrate, today’s big ethical issues in biomedicine are not about safety but often more profound questions...."
Yet Emanuel laments "surely there is much more to say about degrees of openness and how genetics might or might not fit into those different conceptions. [Q]ualitative difference makes a big ethical difference. Rochman never goes there. ...
"Piore seems a bit too admiring of his scientists and indifferent to any concerns. He is so enamored with the power of deep brain stimulation that when the F.D.A. required a randomized, placebo-controlled study of its use in depression - which revealed no benefit - he simply dismisses the problem....
"By his own admission, Piore is mesmerized by new technologies and unfazed by any larger concerns such as the ethics of enhancement and whether these technologies might be available only to the well-off. ...
"To Be a Machine is Mark O’Connell’s gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping the body and ultimately mortality. ...
"He notes that underlying their view is a techno-mechanistic view of humans as simply 'meat machines' that process information - information that can be extracted and exported to a computer or silicon-based robot. ...
"[I]n critiquing techno-utopians, he never goes very deep into understanding the pathology driving them. He feels no attraction to their philosophy.... [H]e fails to translate that feeling into anything approaching a coherent social or ethical critique. This limitation may be most manifest in O'Connell's failure to mention one of the most disturbing aspects of this immortality mania: its utter selfishness. If [billionaire transhumanist Peter] Thiel and others actually succeeded in achieving superlong lives, then reproduction would end. ...
"[T]he Earth would lack the carrying capacity for more people; there would be total resource limits.... Maybe this is why the titans of technology want so badly to escape to Mars." <www.goo.gl/lZ7QAX>
"Data is the new oil, and we humans are the wells." So writes Amy Webb (author, futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute <futuretodayinstitute.com>) as she begins her joint entry for, yes, the same issue of the New York Times Book Review (Mar 19 '17, p16). She considers Data for the People: How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You, by Andreas Weigend <weigend.com> [4]; and The Art of Invisibility: The World’s Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data, by Kevin Mitnick with Robert Vamosi [5].
"Weigend argues persuasively that in this 'post-privacy' world, we should give our data freely, but that we should expect certain protections in return. He advocates a set of rights to increase data refineries’ transparency and to increase our own agency in how information is used. ...
"Not everyone believes that our information should be freely available as long as we agree to the terms of use. In The Art of Invisibility, the internet security expert Kevin Mitnick advocates the opposite. ...
"Most will seem familiar and perhaps rudimentary to those with any technical savvy. For everyone else, he offers an uncomfortable view of how data can be exploited.
"Both books are meant to scare us, and the central theme is privacy: Without intervention, they suggest, we'll come to regret today's inaction. I agree, but the authors miss the real horror show on the horizon. The future's fundamental infrastructure is being built by computer scientists, data scientists, network engineers and security experts just like Weigend and Mitnick, who do not recognize their own biases. This encodes an urgent flaw in the foundation itself. The next layer will be just a little off, along with the next one and the one after that, as the problems compound. ...
"The omission of women and people of color from something as benign as book research illustrates the real challenge of unconscious bias in data and algorithms. Weigend and Mitnick rely only on what's immediate and familiar - an unfortunately common practice in the data community. ... If the people mining and processing our data are nothing like us, and if the machines learn only from them, our data can yield only warped caricatures, like the zombies you see on TV. ...
"You ... may not have experienced algorithmic discrimination yet. You, too, should be afraid. We've only recently struck oil." <www.goo.gl/4ZrM8Z>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids - and the Kids We Have, by Bonnie Rochman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, hardcover, 288 pages) <www.goo.gl/YQHlxX>
2 - The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human, by Adam Piore (Ecco, 2017, hardcover, 400 pages) <www.goo.gl/1buXeS>
3 - To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, by Mark O'Connell (Doubleday, 2017, hardcover, 256 pages) <www.goo.gl/XQAptI>
4 - Data for the People: How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You, by Andreas Weigend (Basic, 2017, hardcover, 272 pages) <www.goo.gl/H6NUwc>
5 - The Art of Invisibility: The World’s Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data, by Kevin Mitnick with Robert Vamosi (Little-Brown, 2017, hardcover, 320 pages) <www.goo.gl/d52Edj>
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