You can’t solve for a non-binary world with binary technology
This week, we look at how both tech companies and government bodies are trying to solve difficult, nuanced problems with binary, machine-readable rules. If you’ve read any of our prior issues, you know where we stand on those sorts of solutions. Read on for more, and stay to the end for a hilarious example of AIs that just can’t get along.
1: Who moderates your memes?
The US is investigating TikTok’s Musical.ly acquisition from a couple of years ago after security and censorship concerns, including reports that Hong Kong protest videos were notably absent from the platform. However, TikTok’s moderation team is apparently US-based, and moderators claim that they were told to keep all political videos from being distributed rather than targeting any specific political region or issue. While China does have a highly troubling approach to political censorship, it’s interesting to see how the US government is responding to potential censorship of political speech on a Chinese-owned platform while in the midst of a complex debate about how US-owned platforms like Twitter and Facebook should be handling political messages.
TikTok said to be under national security review
The review comes after lawmakers raised concerns about TikTok’s growing influence in the United States.
2: Defining political speech
On that note, Twitter announced last week that they will be banning political advertising on the platform, a move that many have applauded, especially on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent, cringeworthy Congressional testimony in defense of Facebook refusing to even fact-check political ads.
The benefit of this decision is that a political message has to earn its reach, not have that reach paid for. In theory this puts a #MAGA tweet on equal footing with a #TeamWarren or #FightFor15 message. However, if take a deeper look, the implications of Twitter’s decision raise more questions than solutions. OneZero’s Will Oremus walks through some of these questions in a thoughtful, nuanced look at the policy. The two big problems he identifies are 1) that it’s extremely hard to tease apart which ads are “political”, and 2) that the policy implicitly prioritizes commercial speech over political speech, which is a stance that should be deeply interrogated.
“But what about the for-profit energy companies whose emissions are driving climate change? Are all of their ads political, or only the ones that specifically reference climate change? Will oil companies be barred from advertising on Twitter? What about ads selling SUVs, encouraging people to eat beef, or buy single-family homes in sprawling suburban neighborhoods?”
Twitter’s ban on political ads will hurt activists, labor groups, and organizers
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Wednesday that the company will ban political advertising, a move that earned the company a rare wave of positive press.
3: How databases encode reality
Twitter’s approach to banning political advertising reflects a larger pattern that we often see from Silicon Valley tech companies. Specifically, there is a solutionist tendency within tech to take complex, highly nuanced human problems and try to apply categorical, binary technical solutions to them. The results of this approach tend to range anywhere from vaguely unsatisfying to downright dangerous.
In this Slate piece, Meredith Broussard discusses the impact that technical solutions have on gender identity. Though our societal understanding of gender has evolved in recent years toward gender as a fluid spectrum, the way gender is represented in technological systems is still often binary. When designing databases, one of the decisions engineers make is what type of data is stored. In many cases, databases that represent identity specify gender as a “boolean” field — a 1 or a 0 — quite literally defining gender as binary. This is just one of many examples of how small engineering and design decisions can have big impact. When we design software, we literally create a translation layer for how our lived, human experiences get encoded in technology. These choices matter.
The next frontier in gender rights is inside databases
This is what happens when you try to superimpose human social values on a mathematical system.
4: What does it mean to move your identity?
A new bill has been proposed by a bipartisan group of senators that would require social networks to let users move their online identities from service to service. Called the ACCESS Act, it calls for a central clearinghouse of identity management, likely a paid service, that would provide for the “secure transfer of data” in a “commonly used, machine-readable format”. Social platforms operating in the US with more than 100 million accounts would be required to make user data available via this new clearinghouse if this bill becomes law.
If you have questions after reading the paragraph above, you’re not alone. “User data” is defined as anything a communication provider collects that can be linked to a user. This leaves enormous questions about what “user data” actually makes sense to transfer from service to service. If I download all my Facebook photos, what does it mean to make that “interoperable” with Twitter or TikTok? If I have privacy settings set on my WhatsApp account, would I want those settings applied to my Messenger account? What does it mean for even basic data like identity, when Facebook requires real names and identities, but Twitter doesn’t? Furthermore, would interoperability lead to social platforms that are increasingly homogenous in their functionality?
While we applaud the basic tenet of giving people more control over their data and where it goes, this act seems to be demanding a solution to a problem that its authors don’t fully understand. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act are both less ambitious than the ACCESS Act and provide well-thought-out mechanisms for respecting privacy and providing access to your collected data.
Congress could require Facebook to build more open APIs under new bill
Mark Zuckerberg wants his own apps to be interoperable, but not like this
5: What operating system does your city run?
As we can see from the discussion above, the shape of our current and future society is the result of complicated entanglement between private tech companies, public culture, and governmental regulation. One of the areas that tension is most apparent is in the evolution of cities and their relationship with new technologies. So we’re very excited about a new book entitled How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. It’s a collection of essays edited by Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern and Joe Shaw that speculate on how different business models might influence and intersect with urban life:
“The stories and essays in this book explore how a city might look, feel and function if the business models, practices and technologies of 38 different companies were applied to the running of cities. They ask: what would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, etc.) or a city where critical public services are delivered by these companies?”
How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables
Should cities be run like businesses? Should city services and infrastructure be run by businesses?
shop.meatspacepress.com • Share
6: This seems like a problem with a simple solution
Despite Bill Gates’s enormous donations to his Foundation — $5 billion a year — his fortune grew by $18 billion in 2019. Steve Ballmer, his former number two at Microsoft, was worth twice as much at the end of 2019 as he was at the end of 2017. As this story says, “when times are good, billionaires can’t help but watch the dollars pile up.”
This article only briefly touches on one source of this inequality, and fails completely to mention the second. First, these billionaires are often increasing their wealth by “perpetuating income inequality in their day jobs”. Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google are constantly in the news for cutting benefits to their staff, overscheduling workers, and underpaying workers. Just a fraction of the profits amassed by these titans, spread across their employees, would make significant differences in their workers’ lives.
Second, as The New York Times Opinion section pointed out recently, the rich really do pay less in taxes than most people. What was once a progressive income tax system has, for all intents and purposes, become a flat tax; effective rates across the income spectrum are between 23 and 30 percent, with the wealthiest 400 families in the country paying the lowest rate. Basically, if the rich really are having trouble spending all that money, maybe we should be less worried about directed philanthropy and “giving pledges”, and more concerned with raising taxes on top earners to help pay for all the services and benefits that aren’t provided by a glitzy charity gala.
Silicon Valley billionaires have a problem: They get richer no matter how much money they give away
Their ever-rising net worths show the problem with small-ball philanthropy.
One AI thing: parking wars
Enjoy these videos of self-driving car AIs fighting with each other over a parking space. Can’t wait for this to play out IRL 🙄.
@unity3d And now... FIGHT!
I had quite some fun with this one 😂
Watch the full video of two AI Agents fighting for the same parking spot here:
https://t.co/iaP5vsHNT4
#MachineLearning #madewithunity #DeepLearning #ReinforcementLearning #unity #AI #MLAgents https://t.co/Y77Z6PIS7Y
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
Powered by Revue