Status Updates From A Citizen's Guide to Artifi...

If you know anything about tech this book is a total slog

I’m determined to finish this book but it’s very entry level on tech ethics, and the technosolutionism that goes unexamined in chapter 3 (“Bias”) rubs me the wrong way. I may need to put this thing down for now and come back later.

I know we can’t expect every book to be systematically critical but I’m lost entirely on a lack of criticism for predictive policing as a body of work, not just of current predictive policing techniques.

“Predictive policing employs artificial intelligence to identify likely targets for police intervention, to prevent crime, and to solve past crimes. Its
most famous incarnation is PredPol, which began in 2006 as a collaboration between the Los Angeles Police Department and … the University of California … is now used by more than sixty police departments around the US…”

… • it is pseudo-objective;
it evades existing protections against discriminatory reasoning based on
race, gender, and other protected categories;
it obscures the often complex decisions made by developers about how
to interpret and categories facts about people's lives; and
it fundamentally distorts the nature of commerce, politics, and everyday life.