Category: Big Data
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Luke Stark argues that Facial recognition should be treated as the “plutonium of AI” – something so dangerous that it’s use should be carefully controlled and limited. If you follow the news, you’ll know that we’re currently treating it as the carbon dioxide of AI, a byproduct of profit-making that doesn’t look too awful on…
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People make snap judgments about those they see the first time – mentally categorizing someone as friendly, threatening, trustworthy, etc. Most of us know that those impressions are idiosyncratic, and suffused with cultural biases along race, gender and other lines. So obviously I know what you’re thinking… we need an AI that do that, right? …
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By Gordon Hull Machine Learning (ML) applications learn by repetition. That is, they come to recognize what, say, a chair looks like, by seeing lots of images of chairs that have been correctly labeled as such. Since the machine is trying to figure out a pattern or set of characteristics that distinguish chairs from other…
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Shameless self-promotion dept… here's the preprint for my new paper, "The Death of the Data Subject," now forthcoming in Law, Culture and the Humanities. And here's the abstract: This paper situates the data privacy debate in the context of what I call the death of the data subject. My central claim is that concept of…
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By Gordon Hull In one of the Seinfeld episodes, the proprietor of a popular lunch stop would deny service to customers who offended his arbitrary sensibilities with a loud “No Soup for You!” This is basically the outcome of the Supreme Court’s June decision on standing, TransUnion v. Ramirez. “Standing” in this sense refers to…
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By Gordon Hull “Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (Marx, Capital I [Penguin Ed.], 548). A recent piece by Josh Dzieza in the Verge about…
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By Gordon Hull Not long ago, Google summarily dumped Timnit Gebru, one of its lead AI researchers and one of the few Black women working in AI. Her coauthor Emily Bender has now posted the paper (to be presented this spring) that apparently caused all the trouble. It should be required reading for anybody who…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I offered some thoughts on Woody Hartzog’s (and co-authors’) development of “obscurity” as a partial replacement for privacy. On Hartzog’s account, privacy is subject to a number of problems, not least of which is that we tend to think in terms of an unsustainable binary: things are either “private” or…
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By Gordon Hull In a series of articles (and a NYT op-ed; my $.02 on that is here), Woddy Hartzog and several co-authors have been developing the concept of “obscurity” as a partial replacement for “privacy.” The gist of the argument, as explained by Hartzog and Evan Selinger in a recent anthology piece (“Obscurity and…
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Per an investigative report in the Washington Post, growing numbers of colleges are using cookies and other website tracking devices to profile potential students and selectively recruit, including sometimes by income level (there’s a long discussion of how Mississippi State appears to be doing this). And of course they do so by spending lots of…
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