[Kip Currier: Excellent podcast discussion of ethics and technology issues by journalist Ezra Klein and Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and host of the tech podcast Function.
One particularly thought-provoking, illustrative exchange about the choices humans make in designing and embedding certain values in AI algorithms and the implications of those choices (~5:15 mark):
Ezra Klein: "This feels really important to me because something I'm afraid of, as you move into a world of algorithms, is that algorithms hide the choices we make. That the algorithm says you're not viable for this mortgage. The algorithm says that this Donald Trump tweet should be at the top of everybody's feeds. And when it's the algorithm, that detachment from human beings gives it a kind of authority. It's like some gatekeeper saying this is what you should be looking at..."...
Anil Dash: "That's right. The algorithm is availing of the fact that it's still the people at that company making the choice. And when YouTube chooses to show disturbing content as "related videos" to my 7-year old son, that is a choice that people at YouTube are making, and people at Google and Alphabet are making. And that when they say "well, the algorithm did it." It's like "well, who made the algorithm?" And you can make it not do that. And I know you could do that because, for example, if it were a copyrighted version of a Beyonce song, you'd instantly stop it from being shared. So the algorithm is a set of choices about values and what you want to invest in. And that is, to that point, technology has values is not neutral."]
"“Marc Andreessen famously said that ‘software is eating the world,’ but it’s far more accurate to say that the neoliberal values of software tycoons are eating the world,” wrote Anil Dash.
Dash’s argument caught my eye. But then, a lot of Dash’s arguments catch my eye. He’s one of the most perceptive interpreters and critics of the tech industry around these days. That’s in part because Dash is part of the world he’s describing: He’s the CEO of Glitch, the host of the excellent tech podcast Function, and a longtime developer and blogger.
In this conversation, Dash and I discuss his excellent list of the 12 things everyone should know about technology. This episode left me with an idea I didn’t have going in: What if the problem with a lot of the social technologies we use — and, lately, lament — isn’t the ethics of their creators or the revenue models they’re built on, but the sheer scale they’ve achieved? What if products like Facebook and Twitter and Google have just gotten too big and too powerful for anyone to truly understand, much less manage?"
