Algorithmic racism

A couple of years ago, when reading an article on photography, I had an "aha" moment.  Because, the article answered a question that had been bugging me for the longest time ever since I came to this country.

What was that problem?

In the photographs back in India, I seemed less dark than in the photographs here in the US.  How could it be that cameras were making me less dark in India and more dark in the US?

Turns out that cameras are racist bastards!  Ok, it is not the machine that is racist.

Think about those old days of roll film.  Exposure to light is what is recorded on the film, right?  Apparently those were calibrated with respect to the fair-skinned folks. It was the narration of a simple incident in that article that helped me understand how I was able to understand my own relative darkness and lightness.

The article said that in the shooting of the movie "In the heat of the night," Sidney Poitier had to have a whole lot of extra light on him in order for the film to properly record his image when he was standing with the white characters.  It made Poitier extra sweaty from the heat, but it worked with the storyline anyway--it was all in humid Mississippi.

Aha!

I was extra dark in the US because I was in mixed company, with whites.  I then looked at a few photos with fellow brown-skinned, and ... you get the point.

That calibration apparently continues with the digital imagery as well.

Think of how much bias exists in that simple aspect of life, photographs, that we don't think about.  Not that the photo technologists were intentional about this.  Not at all.  Now, think about computer software that looks into very many aspects of our lives.  And about artificial intelligence that learns through our responses, which are products of explicit and implicit biases.

And then read this essay that asks "Is your software racist?"

The examples there will/should worry you. I leave it up to you to follow up on the details there.

I want to end this post with this exciting footnote.  The computing expert who is quoted there (and he is working with ACLU on these issues) is, get this, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.  Yes, not only an Indian-American but a Tamil-American.  Yay!

Racists like us. Our robotic future!

Were you like me who guffawed a lot a few years ago when a Google search for "miserable failure" led to this?

Soon after that, Google modified its algorithm and the laughter subsided.  But, the fundamental problem itself continues.

What's the problem?  Remember all my posts (like here) worrying that the searches that do, the photographs that we tag with people's names, our interactions with voice-activated features, are all how the machines learn in order to become better and better?  I.e., we provide the data, which eventually becomes the basis for the "brain" for the machines, and we then turn around and ask questions to which machines provide the answers.

Aha, now you see the problem, don't you?

Latest exhibit: our racism means that the machines become racist?  We--not you the reader nor me the blogger--but the collective we are apparently racist folks in how we do searches.

Do you see the huge problem in the graphic below, which is a Google map of the White House?

Source

What happened?

It was discovered that when searching for “n***a house” and “n***a king,” Maps returned a surprising location: the White House.

It is one thing to laugh at the result of a search for "miserable failure" but another when it takes a sharp racist turn.

BTW, it was not only racism:

A search for “slut’s house” led to an Indiana women’s dorm.

What's going on?  "the internet itself is racist and degrading":

“Certain offensive search terms were triggering unexpected maps results, typically because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place,” wrote Jen Fitzpatrick, VP of Engineering & Product Management. “This surfaced inappropriate results that users likely weren’t looking for.”

The more we users had referred to the White House as the place where a N*a lives, the more the machines learn that association and then they repeat that to us.

The type of invective that led to this more recent Google Maps grotesqueness, though, isn’t something you can simply flip a switch to turn off, because it’s woven into the fabric of the internet itself. Essentially, we’re making internet algorithms racist.

This is truly atrocious, and not at all funny like the old "miserable failure" search because:

And it’s important to understand that while the technical function of producing the recent racist results are similar to how a Googlebomb works, there’s one very big fundamental difference: A Googlebomb is calculated. A group of people decided they wanted to game the “santorum” results and made it happen. In the case of the White House and other offensive Maps searches, the algorithm wasn’t subject to a coordinated effort, it just gathered up all the data the internet could provide, and the internet provided trash.

Yep, nobody was orchestrating a campaign.  The machines simply picked up our usage--they learn really well!

In addition to such racist behavior being despicable, we also need to keep this in mind:

Google doesn’t show us the world; just a curated version that it thinks we want to see.

What it shows is really ugly.

If only the internet users were really just lovable dogs!

Source

Google, education, and knowledge

The fantastic availability of information, and made easy thanks to Google, has made many of us sit back and wonder if all these are good or bad news. Like that old Chinese parable. You wonder which one? Email me for that :-)

A couple of months ago, this essay in the Atlantic asked whether Google was making us stupid. At the same time, we have a whole bunch of people complaining that high school and college graduates seem to be uninformed and incompetent. And, comedians like Jay Leno routinely joke about the prevailing dumbness in society. I suspect that we are only beginning the next iteration of discussions. Why do I say this is the "next iteration?" According to Brian Cathcart, this is nothing but a reformulation of a situation from 2400 years ago:

... the story of the Egyptian god Thoth. I looked it up, and it was told by Plato. It goes like this: Thoth has invented writing and proudly offers it as a gift to the king of Egypt, declaring it “an elixir of memory and wisdom”. But the king is horrified, and tells him: “This invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written…rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind. So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you are equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth.”

That was written 2,400 years ago, and Lloyd pointed out that similar arguments about inevitable damage to human thinking and memory attended the arrival of printing in the 15th century AD. We seem to have survived both shocks with our capacity for general knowledge intact, indeed enhanced. That puts modern concerns into perspective.

But, yes, as much as I am a HUGE fan of the web, Google, and many other widgets out there, I wonder whether we are outsourcing away too much of what we ought to be doing ourselves.

What does Cathcart say?

There will always be dimwits, and their feats of stupidity will always make news. Equally, there will always be teachers and parents who shake their heads at the supposed ignorance of the young. We need to be careful before we construct trends from such things. But the internet is different, and it lifts the discussion onto a different plane. We are bound to tap into it for general knowledge, and the young will do it first. Schools are surely right to encourage them. The story of Thoth tells us that the curmudgeonly response—“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it”—is a waste of breath.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In this thought-provoking piece in the Atlantic, Nicholas Carr wonders about our intelligence the more we rely on the Web and Google. Excerpt:
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.

My own take? No, Google is not making us stupid. And, yes, I can see it becoming a pathway to AI. But, that AI does not mean a flattening out of human intelligence.