Month: June 2019

Read Amazon’s next big thing may redefine big (BBC News)

Amazon doesn’t feel it has a responsibility to make sure its groundbreaking technology is always used ethically.

“Civil rights groups have called it “perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed”, and called for Amazon to stop selling it to government agencies, particularly police forces.”

“Mr Vogels doesn’t feel it’s Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.

“That’s not my decision to make,” he tells me.”

Murky AF. I guess this kind of moral self-absolution is a necessity if you’re in charge of Amazon.

“He likens ML and AI to steel mills. Sometimes steel is used to make incubators for babies, he says, but sometimes steel is used to make guns.”

Amazon’s ML/AI is not a raw material. It’s shaped (and sold) by a cadre of people at Amazon.

Do they build in any accountability mechanisms to their algorithms?

They’re making a loaded technology. They’re making the guns, and he’s saying “hey – it’s not our responsibility to add safety catches.”

 

Amazon and ethics

Liked The Blog and Wiki Combo by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

To me blogs and wikis are the original social software. My blog emerged as a personal knowledge management tool (Harold Jarche is the go-to source for PKM). Knowledge management to me has always been a very people centered, social thing.

Kicks Condor discusses his ‘infostrat’ (information strategy), as filtered through a reading of Ton‘s writings on the topic.

What’s an infostrat?  Picking up from Ton and Kicks:

“deciding what and how to bookmark or archive stuff, sorting through conflicting news stories and accusations, and alternating “periods of discovery with periods of digesting and consolidating”

and

“what is my strategy to comb through the gigs and gigs of input I can plug myself into on the Web?”

I find it all very interesting and would like to work out an infostrat for myself.  Quite often I fall into the pit of infinite scroll and end up in a mess of information overload.  Need to change my filters.

What do I want from the world of information out there?  I would separate my goals in to the social and the informational.

For the social side: I want to not only communicate with people, but to over time become close to some of them.  I must say that until recently, social media has always felt remarkably asocial to me.  Ton seems to have achieved sociality very well over time through blogging. I’d like to explore if there’s a knack to that, other than just giving it time.

For the informational side: this is more what social media has traditionally given me.  However, so far, it’s facilitated more consumption than consolidation I would say.  So I am very intrigued by Kicks’ mention of the linkage between blogs and wikis.  I like the idea of the blog timeline crystallising into a personal wiki over time.

Thanks Ton and Kicks for the discussion.  I have some reading to do!

Introduced to infostrats

Read We Have Never Been Social by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

The project has as its working title We Have Never Been Social: Rethinking the Internet. It revisits the history of the Internet’s development and, in particular, the rise of the social media structures that have come to dominate so much of our experience of networked communication, arguing that a significant part of what has led us to the mess we find ourselves in today is a desperately flawed model of sociality, one that is in fact not just un-social but anti-social.

What if the problem with social media isn’t just that it got centralized, but something deeper than that?  Looking forward to seeing this project by Kathleen Fitzpatrick progress as she looks at the history of sociality online.

That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.

Listened to The story of Grenfell United – podcast from the Guardian

Natasha Elcock and Ed Daffarn escaped from Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. Karim Mussilhy’s uncle died in the fire. They talk about their work with Grenfell United, while the Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Rob Booth, discusses government inaction

Two years after Grenfell, there has been little change or progress in the provision of safe social housing in the UK.

Summed up in the podcast as being down to a lethal mix of indifference, incompetence, and dicking about with Brexit.

Despite the liberatory potential of technology, of which I see free software playing a big role, there’s a very real concern of ending up with a kind of technocratic ‘vanguard party’.

You can debate the merits of vanguardism in general, but couple it with the current disproportionate skew of tech roles to white and male – which is even more pronounced in free software at present – and throw in the ‘scratch your own itch’ trope.

That’s a huge systemic problem as vanguard becomes regime.

Some things I am learning: if you’re white and male and into free software (I am), recognise that you have a very blinkered and narrow view of the world.

* Spend half the time you use learning Yet Another Technology to educate yourself about race, gender and class struggles (historical and present).

* Pipe down and listen to others when it comes to discussions about what is needed in software.

* Don’t ‘scratch your own itch’ – serve a community. If you’re white, male and technically proficient you’ve got enough privilege in the bank to pay it back building for others rather than yourself.

Technology and privilege

Listened to Cruel state: the impact of austerity on disabled people from the Guardian

Frances Ryan discusses the impact that austerity has had on disabled people and Helen Davidson discusses the Hong Kong protests.

This podcast made me very angry.  The effects Tory austerity has had on disabled people in the UK.  After a lot of hard-won gains for disability rights in the 80s and 90s, the Cameron government rolled most of those gains back in the bogus pursuit of austerity.

Cruel state: the impact of austerity on disabled people