We Should Probably Stop Blaming Technology For The Failings Of Human Beings

from the technology-is-a-mirror dept

I've been thinking a lot lately about how so many of the "problems" that people bring up with regards to the internet these days -- much of them having to do with disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, etc. -- are really manifestations of the problems of people in general, perhaps magnified by technology. At some point I'll likely write more on this concept, but as such it's difficult to see how blaming the technology solves the underlying problems of humanity. It's treating the symptoms, not the disease. Or, worse, in many cases it seems like an attempt to brush the disease under the rug and hope it disappears (to mix metaphors a bit). Alicia Wanless has written a long an interesting post that makes a similar, though slightly different point.

She also notes that blaming technology seems unlikely to solve the underlying issues.

And yet, in the fear that is spreading about the future of democracy and threats of undue influence (whatever that might mean), there is no shortage of blame and simplified calls to action: “the governments should regulate the tech companies!”; “the tech companies should police their users!”; “we should do back whatever is done against us – so, more propaganda!” In all of this, I cannot help but think we might be missing something; are we fundamentally approaching the problem in the wrong way? ?

Technology might have brought us to this point where we now must look at ourselves, our society in this digital mirror. But it is not to blame. These issues are not new. Persuasion, manipulation, deception, abuse – none of these are new. Humans have been doing and suffering from these things forever. What is new is the scale, speed and reach of such things. If anything, ICTs have only amplified our pre-existing issues – and as such, no technical solution can truly fix it.

She further notes that, since technology is changing so rapidly, any attempt to solve the "problems" discussed above by targeting tech platforms is unlikely to have much long term impact, as the purveyors of disinformation will just move elsewhere. Now that people know how to leverage technology in this manner, it's not like they're just going to stop. Furthermore, she notes that merely censoring and brushing content under the rug can often have the opposite of the intended effect (something we've talked quite a bit about here):

Filtering and blocking people into protection is not just impractical in a digital age, it is dangerous. This is the informational equivalent of obsessive disinfectant use – what will happen to that bubbled audience when “bad” information inevitably comes through? To say nothing of the consequences for democracy in such a managed information environment. After all, blocking access to information only makes it more coveted through the scarcity effect. And given that the people exposed to misinformation are seldom those who see the corrective content questions remain about the utility of efforts to dispel and counter such campaigns. If we want to protect democracy, we must make citizens more resilient and able to discern good information from bad.

That last line is important, but I've seen a number of people pushing to regulate tech more mock this idea, rolling their eyes and saying "media literacy is not the answer." I'm not convinced of that, in general, but Wanless has a slightly different approach. She's not just talking about media literacy, but about the fact that the western world seems blind to the fact that we have spent decades promoting our own propaganda on the rest of the world, and they find it laughable when we complain about them doing the same, using the technology that we developed.

Of course, to do this, we in liberal democracies, will have to come to terms with something we have avoided for a while: how much persuasion is acceptable and where are the lines? What is good versus bad information and who decides that? Who can legitimately use persuasion and when? ? This is the elephant in the room – persuasion. And it is not enough to say that when we use persuasion it is acceptable, but when an adversary does so it is not.

Until we in the West come to terms with our awkward relationship with propaganda and persuasion, we cannot effectively tackle issues associated with the manipulation of the information environment. For far too long our aversion to persuasion has made us hypocrites, trying to disguise attempts at influencing other populations with various euphemisms (which also might explain why words are failing us now in describing the situation).

As she notes, we in the west can argue that US and western influence campaigns around the world were different from, say, Russian or Chinese influence campaigns these days, but it's a distinction that doesn't much matter to those pushing disinformation campaigns today. They see it all as the same thing.

She ends her piece with some suggestions on what to do -- and I recommend going there to read them -- but I'm still thinking a lot about how the internet has really held up a mirror to society, and we don't really like what we see. But rather than recognizing that we need to fix society -- or some of our political corruptions -- we find it easier to blame the messenger. We find it easier to blame the tool that held up this mirror to society.

We can't fix the underlying problems of society -- including over-aggressive tribalism -- by forcing tech companies to be arbiters of truth. We can't fix underlying problems of society by saying "well, this dumb view should never be allowed to be shared" no matter how dumb. We fix the underlying problems in society by actually understanding what went wrong, and what is still going wrong. But fixing society is hard. Blaming the big new(ish) companies and their technology is easy. But it's not going to fix anything at all if we keep denying the larger fundamental flaws and problems in society that created the conditions that resulted in the tech being used this way.

Filed Under: blame, culture, human beings, technology

No, Your Kid Isn't Growing Horns Because Of Cellphone Use

from the another-moral-techno-panic dept

This week, the Washington Post grabbed plenty of attention for a story that claimed that kids are actually growing "horns" because of cell phone use. The story, which leans on 2016 and 2018 research out of Australia, was cribbing off of this more nuanced piece by the BBC on how skeletal adaptation to modern living changes are kind of a thing. The Post's more inflammatory take was accompanied by a wide variety of other stories proclaiming that today's children are growing horns and bone spurs because they use their durn cellphones too much!

The Washington Post put it this way, with an accompanying, scary X-Ray pulled from the initial research:

"What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit. New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments."

The problem is that while the research did find that human skeletons are shifting and changing in the modern era due to postural and other behaviors, they weren't able to prove that cellphones were the culprit. There's a wide variety of modern human behaviors that could influence skeletal shifts, from watching television and reading books to terrible posture resulting from a lack of meaningful exercise. Only a few reporters could be bothered to note that at no point did the researchers directly, actually link the "horns" to cellphone use. In fact, technology isn't even mentioned in the source data:

"The researchers don’t mention technology or smartphones at all in their 2018 research, but they do make a statement in the discussion section of their 2016 paper. They make an educated guess that the prevalence of enthesophytes may have to do with “the increased use of hand-held technologies from early child-hood."

Their research does not prove that device use causes these bony appendages. They don’t even claim that device use and appendages are correlated. They simply make an educated guess in the discussion section, pointing to a topic for future research."

As journalist Caroline Haskins notes, the whole hysteria is reminiscent of the "smartphone pinky" scare that bubbled up a few years ago, which proclaimed that people's fingers were being "deformed" by the way they hold their electronic gadgets and smartphones. And it's tangentially related to the recent panic over the recent "Momo" hoax, which proclaimed that a viral game making the rounds on services like WhatsApp and YouTube involved a demonic-looking chicken lady goading young children into acts of violence or even suicide.

We love a good moral panic. And such panics often go viral because Americans are (if that hadn't been made clear in recent years) immeasurably susceptible to bullshit. But it's a problem made so much worse by a media that can't just focus on the amazing science and technology news and issues of the day, but instead quickly falls prey to nonsensical bullshit to generate additional ad revenue. And because the debunking stories see a quarter (or less) of the attention of the original inflammatory reports ("A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," as the old saying goes), there's a huge chunk of the public walking around with fluff and nonsense in their heads where factual data should be.

Filed Under: horns, mobile phones, moral panic, technology

Lack Of Internet Access Threatens 2020 Census Success And The Future Latino Voting Power

from the digital-divide-matters dept

American elections are threatened by more than just Russian hacking; the lack of internet access for the growing Latino population undermines our democracy thanks to a shift to online counting for the 2020 census.

Russian agents have and can again hack algorithms and voting systems -- but it matters little in the grand scheme of things if Latinos (the largest minority group in the U.S.) are blocked from participating in the election process before they even get to the voting booth. Without home internet access, the online 2020 census will be another modern civic duty millions of American Latinos won’t have the luxury of participating in, and Congress needs to do something about it.

In 2015, 44 percent of Latinos did not have a broadband connection at home. Connecting to the internet is essential to participate in the 21st century economy. Without internet access, Latinos are shut out from many government benefits and responsibilities -- including the 2020 census. With so many Latinos on the wrong side of the digital divide, the census moving online could cause a domino effect for policies that rely heavily on census data -- like drawing voting districts.

Moving the 2020 census online will make it harder to count Latinos, who have been undercounted in the U.S. census for decades. Particularly, the Census Bureau reports that 1.5 percent of the Latino population was undercounted in 2010. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights cites barriers such as language, poverty, education, and immigrant status as continuing causes to the undercount of Latinos.

To be sure, those who cannot self-report online will have a paper option similar to the paper options of past censuses. However, the Census Bureau will no longer be conducting door-to-door surveying en mass, and will rely heavily on online marketing. The paper option alone will not be an adequate replacement for those without broadband so long as the Bureau also eliminates its door to door survey -- a necessary component to ensure more accurate counts.

It is also true that the Bureau plans to make the 2020 census form available on mobile devices. However, this is not an equivalent option for those who are smartphone reliant. Not to mention smartphone data plans can be extremely limiting and are often the first thing to go in a time of financial hardship. At least 23 percent of smartphone owners report cancelling or suspending their service because of financial restraint.

The online shift in the 2020 census is particularly troubling for a population with a history of census problems. Although there was a one-time “Mexican” option on the 1930 census, the U.S. didn’t make its first real attempt to measure the Latino population until the 1970 census. It wasn’t until the 2000 census that the U.S. even started using the term “Latino.” Before this, mix-ups or exclusive terminology made tracing data from decade to decade problematic.

To worsen matters, the Census Bureau is making this drastic change based on inaccurate, or missing, data on exactly who has internet access -- and who remains unconnected. A lack of Congressional funds and problematic methodologies have slowed processes and produced over-exaggerated maps. Where connection is available, it’s worthless if a household doesn’t have a computer or (in the very least) a mobile device to utilize that connection. Even more troublesome is when families can’t afford to connect; a growing familiarity as cost remains the number one barrier to broadband adoption.

With 21.9 percent of the Latino population in the U.S. living in poverty, more needs to be done to address the digital divide -- both where broadband is already deployed and where it isn’t yet. Closing the digital divide starts with preserving and expanding programs like Lifeline (an FCC program that provides a subsidy for low-income families to access communications services), to expanding municipal broadband, and to encouraging competition in existing broadband markets -- all things Trump’s FCC is actively working to gut.

Despite showing up to the voting booth for President Obama in 2008, Latinos face trouble with voting. If undercounted, Latino voting power will be diminished even more by efforts to gerrymander congressional districts or concentrate Latinos into one or two small districts. Solving these voting rights issues is not likely before the 2020 census, but an undercount of the Latino population due to the digital divide certainly will worsen matters.

As the 2020 census goes online for the first time, the digital divide is a threat to the future voting power of Latinos and other unconnected communities, including disconnected urban areas as well as rural America. One thing is for sure, we will continue to see an undercount and underestimation in political districting if large swaths of Americans can’t effectively participate in the new census. The digital divide’s impact on the 2020 census poses a significant problem that Congress should be invested in solving now instead of when it’s too late.

Daiquiri Ryan is Policy Counsel for the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC)

Filed Under: census, digital divide, latinos, technology, voting

The Criminal Justice System Is Relying On Tech To Do Its Job And That's Just Going To Make Everything Worse

from the laying-the-groundwork-for-human-misery dept

The criminal justice system appears to be outsourcing a great deal of its work. On the law enforcement side, automatic license plate readers, facial recognition tech, and predictive policing have replaced beat cops walking the streets and patrolling the roads. Over on the judicial side, analytic software is helping make sentencing decisions. This is supposed to make the system better by removing bias and freeing up government personnel to handle more difficult duties algorithms can't handle.

As is the case with most things government, it works better in theory than in practice. ALPRs create massive databases of people's movements, accessible by a hundreds of law enforcement agencies subject to almost zero oversight. More is known about facial recognition's failures than its successes, due to inherent limitations that churn out false positives at an alarming rate. Predictive policing is the algorithmic generation of self-fulfilling prophecies, building on historical crime data to suggest future crimes will occur in high crime areas.

While the judicial side might seem more promising because it could prevent judges from acting on their biases when handing down sentences, the software can only offer guidance that can easily be ignored. That and the software introduces its own biases based on the data it's fed.

The logic for using such algorithmic tools is that if you can accurately predict criminal behavior, you can allocate resources accordingly, whether for rehabilitation or for prison sentences. In theory, it also reduces any bias influencing the process, because judges are making decisions on the basis of data-driven recommendations and not their gut.

You may have already spotted the problem. Modern-day risk assessment tools are often driven by algorithms trained on historical crime data.

As we’ve covered before, machine-learning algorithms use statistics to find patterns in data. So if you feed it historical crime data, it will pick out the patterns associated with crime. But those patterns are statistical correlations—nowhere near the same as causations. If an algorithm found, for example, that low income was correlated with high recidivism, it would leave you none the wiser about whether low income actually caused crime. But this is precisely what risk assessment tools do: they turn correlative insights into causal scoring mechanisms.

Correlation is not causation. Past performance is not indicative of future results. And an individual being sentenced is not the average of 20 years of historical crime data. The software may steer judges away from personal biases, but it creates new ones to replace them. It's a lateral "improvement" that does little more than swap the inputs.

Once you've got a system brought up to speed on garbage in, the biases multiply and perpetuate. Sentencing decisions based on biased data generate more bad data for the sentencing software… which then leads to successively harsher sentences for the same criminal act with each iteration. As the recursive data rolls in, the sentencing recommendations will justify themselves because who can argue with raw data?

This is not to say tech should not be used by the criminal justice system. It's that it needs to be subject to rigorous oversight and its employers made aware of its limitations, including its innate ability to reinforce biases, rather than remove them. This isn't something to be taken lightly. The lives and liberties of Americans are literally at stake. Taking a hands-off approach to tech deployment is highly irresponsible, and it indicates those in power care very little about what happens to the people they serve.

Filed Under: algorithms, criminal justice, technology

Slack Banning Random Iranian Ex-Pats Shows Why Making Tech Companies Police The Internet Is Crazy Stupid

from the this-is-a-bad-idea dept

On Thursday morning, I started seeing a bunch of tweets pop up in my feed from people of Iranian backgrounds, who no longer lived in Iran, who were having their entire Slack groups shut down, with the company blaming US laws regarding sanctions on Iran.

There are a lot more reports like this, but that was just the first batch I found with a quick search. Slack's explanation to the press seems... lacking:

“We updated our system for applying geolocation information, which relies on IP addresses, and that led to the deactivations for accounts tied to embargoed countries,” the representative said. “We only utilize IP addresses to take these actions. We do not possess information about nationality or the ethnicity of our users. If users think we’ve made a mistake in blocking their access, please reach out to feedback@slack.com and we’ll review as soon as possible.”

All of the blocked people talking about it on Twitter note that they don't live in any sanctioned country -- though many admit to having visited those countries in the past (often years ago) and probably checking in on Slack while they were there. That... is not how the sanctions system is supposed to work. In another press statement Slack tries to pin the blame on the US government:

“Slack complies with the U.S. regulations related to embargoed countries and regions. As such, we prohibit unauthorized Slack use in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea region of Ukraine. For more information, please see the US Department of Commerce Sanctioned Destinations , The U.S. Department of Treasury website, and the Bureau of Industry and Security website.”

But that's bullshit. The sanctions rules don't say you have to cut off completely anyone who ever connected from a sanctioned country. The Verge (linked above) spoke to an Oxford researcher with knowledge in this area:

“They are either incompetent at OFAC interpretation or racist,” said Oxford researcher Mahsa Alimardani, who specializes in communication tools in Iran.

[....]

“Detecting an Iranian IP address on a paid account (which is presumed to be for business) login as a violation of sanctions is a wrong interpretation of these regulations,” Alimardani says. “At best it’s over-regulation to prevent any sort of misunderstanding or possible future hassle with OFAC.”

Of course, as former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos notes in his own tweet on this topic, this is exactly what happens when you have vague rules with strong punishment, and expect internet platforms to magically police the web:

And of course, we're seeing more and more and more of that. FOSTA does that in the US. The GDPR is doing that around the globe. The EU Copyright Directive will do that. The EU Terrorist Content Regulation will do it. And a bunch of other regulations targeting the internet as well. That's why some of us keep warning that these laws are going to lead to widespread censorship and suppression of free speech. Because that's how it always works out. If you threaten internet platforms with huge penalties for failing to block content, but leave the details pretty vague, they're going to make decisions like that and simply kick people off their services entirely, rather than face liability. It's a recipe for disaster -- and one that seems to be favored by tons of clueless regulators, politicians, and plenty of people who just don't realize how much harm they will cause.

Filed Under: iran, iranians, ofac, sanctions, technology
Companies: slack

It's Been 50 Years: Take Some Time This Weekend To Watch Doug Engelbart's Mother Of All Demos

from the history-in-the-making dept

Normally, on the weekend, we look back at what we wrote about on Techdirt five, ten and fifteen years ago, but I'm going to pre-empt at least a bit of that with this post. Ten years ago, we wrote about the 40th anniversary of the famous and iconic "Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart on December 9th, 1968. A little over five years ago, we wrote about it again, unfortunately on the occasion of Engelbart's passing.

But, Sunday will now mark the 50th anniversary of the demo, and there's a very impressive looking Symposium about it happening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

It's interesting, in Silicon Valley, how much disdain some have for the past. After all, it's here that we're always talking about inventing the future. Engelbart's demo, 50 years ago, was exactly that. Before even the idea of a graphical user interface for a computer, or the concept of a wider internet, was conceived of, Engelbart was literally demoing a ton of ideas, products, concepts and services that we all use regularly today. Even the demo itself (let alone what he was demoing) was somewhat historic, as the demo showed what was happening on his computer on-screen, but part of it was done via teleconferencing and video sharing (again before most people even had the foggiest idea what that could mean). It demonstrated, for the first time, ideas like the computer mouse, a word process, windows, a graphical user interface, computer graphics, hypertext linking, collaborative editing, version control, dynamic linking and more.

I watch the entire 90 minutes every few years, and it's amazing how inspiring it is. How miraculous it is. Every time we link to it, it ends up moving around or appearing in different chunks online, but the Doug Engelbart Institute now has it in three separate parts (each about 30 minutes) on YouTube, so I'll post that version here:

Or, if you really don't want to watch the entire thing, there's a nicely done "interactive version" that breaks it down into sections and sub-sections, so you can just watch the clips that are of most interest to you (though, I still recommend watching the entire thing for context).

Part of what's so inspiring about the demo, of course, is that we're watching it in retrospect. We now know what transpired over the next 50 years. If none of what Engelbart had presented became common, the demo would probably just be seen as quirky nonsense, a la predictions of flying cars and moon bases. But, that's not what happened at all. Instead, we know that watching Engelbart's demo is watching real history in action.

It's watching the impossible, the magical, become reality. It's the very thing that has made Silicon Valley so much fun for the past 50 years. Making the impossible not just possible, but everyday. Enabling people to do amazing things.

Of course, we're living now in an age where the narrative on technology has shifted. People are recognizing that innovation and advancement isn't always all good for everyone. People are recognizing that it has consequences and creates problems -- sometimes serious ones. And those conversations are vital.

But as that narrative has shifted, I worry tremendously about throwing out all of the good things that have come with innovation in our rush to prevent any possible downsides. I'm glad that there's some level of reckoning happening, and people are proactively trying to think through the impact (both good and bad) of what they're creating these days. But, I worry that the narrative has shifted so far that in order to prevent "bad" we're going to end up tossing out much of the good that is set to come as well.

I'm not quite 50 years old yet, but the amount of technological change and innovation in my lifetime has been amazing -- and I'd argue that the vast majority of it has been good. It has opened up new worlds. It has enabled new ways to communicate. It has brought knowledge and information to far flung corners of the globe. It has enabled people all over the world to have an impact. And it continues to change as well.

Watching the Mother of All Demos once again lets us wonder about what will happen in the next 50 years. And it gives us a chance to appreciate all that has happened (and has been allowed to happen) over the past 50 years. Engelbart didn't lock up his ideas. He didn't block others from using them. There aren't stories of nasty patent fights (even if he had a bunch of patents). He shared these ideas for the world to see, and the world took these ideas and ran with them, built on them, improved on them and created the amazing world we now live in. This should not be the end of the history of innovation, but a sign of what happens when people do allow for great innovation, and seek to make the impossible, possible.

Filed Under: demo, doug engelbart, future, innovation, technology, the demo, the mother of all demos