While this specific incidence does not necessarily pose a significant ethical question with regards to privacy, as consent was asked, how technology is used in this application does bring about some issues. For example, while we hold Microsoft to a high standard because we know the company, what about other companies using similar technologies, both for good and bad? Will privacy always be prioritized?
The article also highlights the current issue in the U.S., and around the world, of “cyberchondria,” which is a phenomenon where people tend to look to the internet to answer what their symptoms mean, only to escalate their symptoms to the worst extreme. Perhaps with the transition to more forms of e-health, this cyberchondria issue will become less of a problem.
]]>As TJ said in class, it is also crucial that people who are responsible for creating this technology take responsibility and work to make it less biased. I don’t know if this will be possible soon, though; the judicial system, being already extremely racially biased, influences whether or not people can get jobs, which affects the algorithm by tying having a job or not to the risk score created. Thus, the fastest way may not be turning to technology, but instead paying more attention to the people making the decisions.
]]>Northpointe’s algorithm has been shown to turn up flawed results. Broward County, Florida uses the score in pretrial hearings, and ProPublica’s research proved it remarkably unreliable. Only 20 percent of those predicted to commit violent crimes did so, and when looking at all crimes it was only slightly more reliable “than a coin flip.” Moreover, it turned up black defendants as more likely to be future criminals two times as much as whites, and also incorrectly labeled whites as low risk more frequently.
Regarding ethics, we determined multiple options for possible outcomes. One extreme would be for technologies such as the risk assessment algorithm and Amazon’s facial recognition to continue to be used in their current capacities. This would mean bias being perpetuated in yet another mode. The opposing option for the former would be for these technologies to be banned entirely. While this would prevent the fundamental flaws currently happening with both the algorithm and facial recognition, there are also benefits that can be had from using this technology, were bias, specifically against people of color, to be removed. As we spoke about in class, just because a product has a high success rate, that does not mean that the success rate of predicting is equal among everybody. Thus, while an average looks successful, the accuracy can be completely skewed. Therefore, the third alternative, which is the alternative our group said we could live with, is to ban products like these until they can be re-thought and created to display no bias.
]]>Towards the end of the article, Isaak lays out propositions for how to preserve privacy and protect data. The principles fall under four sub-categories, “public transparency,” “disclosure for users,” “control,” and “notification.” Regarding actual legislation that has been proposed, there are three current propositions in the works. The first, the Blumenthal-Markey bill, focuses on protecting the privacy, focusing on the “opt-in” aspect of consent, while the second bill, put forth by Senator Amy Klobuchar, maintains similar elements but also adds more on notification of changes. Lastly, California is pushing to further secure privacy rights for its citizens, hopefully setting a standard for how to address user privacy in the U.S., and the world, following Facebook & Cambridge Analytica’s inappropriate handling of user data.
Luis wrote the first paragraph, and Kate wrote the second.
]]>I also got to thinking about the duty-based approach; for example, I got to thinking about how it can be applied outside an actual set of rules. In my “Theories of Culture” course, I took last semester, we spoke about the idea of “social fact,” which was postulated by Émile Durkheim. While this may on the one hand seem not to fall under the duty-based approach, I believe that some of these cultural norms can so heavily influence the individual without a directly written declaration, and many of these can be unethical.
Regarding “Don’t Get Distracted, I find it interesting that the author of, Caleb Thompson, stayed at his job despite the experience they refer to in the story. I felt that the story’s ending led me to believe that Thompson had quit their job.
At the end of class, Professor Rodrigues brought up the question of whether or not Thompson’s ability to tell this story is somewhat dampened by the fact that they completed their job at the DOD. While I acknowledge that, as Professor Rodrigues mentioned in class, first jobs can be tough and one may do things they didn’t expect to, I wonder if the author had included a bit about finishing their posting; perhaps, then, readers might not feel so disillusioned.
]]>While we didn’t delve especially deep into this in class (it also appeared that Unsworth was a bit unclear on this as well), I am curious about the discussion of property and labor. Specifically, I am curious about the detachment of the human from humanity, where human is used and seen as the mode of production rather than an autonomous being (I am not sure if this is what people were referring to with Marx, as my memory of and exposure to Marxist theory is somewhat limited to a history class in high school).
Regarding my specific reading by Ritchie, one thing that seemed odd to me was the blend of technological history and social history. It felt like Ritchie was just adding random little “but it really was fun, and we were a community” type of notes in between large chunks of dense info on Multics and Unix. After talking on end about Unix as we know it today, Ritchie even chose to end the paper with a paragraph on looking back at his time at Bell Labs with a “rosy glow.” I thought this might tie into what we have been talking about regarding the treatment of creation as a fun thing rather than as a job.
As a side note, I struggled with writing this blog post, as I felt that there were many ideas brought up in class that were hard to unpack (you may notice that this post feels a bit all over the place). However, knowing that we usually continue and touchback on previous discussions, I know that things will become more clear!
]]>In 1968-69 Bell commissioned the development of a precursor software called Multics. The project was enormously expensive and failed to deliver the usable features promised during development. The technical research conducted by Ritchie, Thompson, and Canaday on Multics did, however, prove fruitful as a preliminary design for the filing system rolled out in Unix.
The first part of this early design was PDP-7 Unix file system. This system consisted of an i-list, directories, and special files describing devices. Unlike the current system, PDP-7 had no path names, configurations were hard to change, and there was a lack of path names. Processes existed early in this system such as system calls fork, exec, wait, and exit.
A new disk allowed for the first PDP-11 system to be created. Unlike PDP-7, this system was dedicated to word processing. Due to it only running on a single .5 MB disk, every new program required care and boldness because the system could easily crash.
Throughout this article also ran a string of social aspects to go along with the technical history that Ritchie provided. For example, though Ritchie describes the downfall of Multics, he also adds that he and the group were able to use the operating system just between them, saying, “what we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form” (Ritchie, 2). It seemed odd to find these types of sentences interwoven with the more technical aspects, as the document itself seems to naturally focus on the changes made to and the problem-solving of the operating system itself. These interesting additions to the text all culminate at the end of the document, where Ritchie ends on a nostalgic note, even including the phrase “rosy glow.” At the same time, Ritchie is describing a process that involved many idea proposals and rejections and versions of the final product.
By the 1960s the Department of Defense’s program was working on creating network-to-network protocol that would allow computers to communicate with one another. The new protocol was known as the TCP, which details how information is broken into packets, and IP, which focuses on sending the packets across the network. Although some computers connected with each other, Tim Berners-Lee created a system for universal communication using a URL accessible through HTTP formatted in HTML. Since the technical terms are not necessary for the story, the essay summarizes its purpose: “Browsers are used to connect to remote computers over the Internet and to request, retrieve and display the web pages on the local machine” (O’Regan 169).
Many may wonder why O’Regan may have included a section regarding business models in a chapter about the history of the internet. However, it is essential to see how the World Wide Web changed so much about how business was conducted, as it has had a profound influence on how the internet influences society today. While the World Wide Web grew at a staggering pace, creating many financial successes, it is crucial to acknowledge the mess it produced as a result of the dot-com bubble. O’Regan two main issues of this era that lead to the subsequent downfall of many companies. The first was the fact that many companies had deeply unsound business models (the article discusses how a good business model with a bad idea can be more beneficial than a flawed business model and even the best of ideas), and the share price of stocks were severely inflated, as companies values were examined based on “potential future earnings.” Thus, while we recognize that the World Wide Web has paved the way for a “new economy,” it is important to acknowledge the various occurrences as a result of this significant change.
Sean: 1st paragraph | Luis: 2nd paragraph | Kate: 3rd paragraph & post
]]>In an attempt to understand further things that occurred surrounding the Fairchild plant on the Navajo Shiprock Reservation, I went to the internet and looked at images, twitter posts, and YouTube videos, along with articles. I was even more surprised, though, given how expansive the internet can be, that there were not many resources on this subject.
When I typed in “Navajo weavers Fairchild,” almost all of the first page was a link to Nakamura’s article. On YouTube, I only could find videos on how Navajo women weave and one TEDx video titled “What it means to be a Navajo Woman.”
One Twitter user, Kyle McDonald, tweeted, “how did I not know this story about Navajo weavers providing the backbone for Fairchild semiconductor in the 60s and 70s?” I am not particularly surprised at the fact that nobody seems to know, as there are very few sources of information for the history itself. Lisa Nakamura appears to be one of the only easily findable people talking about this to a broader audience.
The most helpful image I found on Google Images was an image found initially from Kyle McDonald ’s tweet. The picture was from what I assume to either be an art museum or a book of art that featured a piece by Navajo weaver Marilou Schultz titled “Replica of a Chip.” The work was a woven in 1994 and featured the design of a computer chip; she also had previously been commissioned by Intel to create a circuit board weaving years earlier. If I am reading the text on this image correctly, however, Schultz was unaware of the ties to Fairchild’s history of using Navajo women to produce circuit boards in the decade between 1965 and 1975.
Thus, further exploration of this subject has further amplified my previous understanding through this course of how history is told and the differences when different people are telling the story.
]]>Fairfield publicized that these women were particularly well suited for the job due to their transferable skill from their practice of weaving, an algorithmic art that was often overlooked due to its association with the domestic sphere. Because of the meticulous attention to detail necessary to weave rugs, Navajo women were seen as perfect for producing chips accurately, quickly, and painlessly. These women were also hailed as the ideal workforce because they were mobile, cheap, and above all, flexible; they could be laid off at any time. As a result, their previous experiences allowed for these digital circuits to be manufactured in such a large scale.
However, although this decision to insource work was advertised as of dual benefit to both Fairfield and Navajo women from both sides, the project did not result in a great economic payoff to the women themselves. Furthermore, the manufacture itself was made to seem like it was “preserving” Navajo culture. Nakamura describes a Fairchild brochure from 1969 in which the transition from weaving to circuit making is made to seem an “extension of Navajo culture. Through the reading we come to understand that it is not due to these traits that Navajo women were hired, but rather, as Nakamura eloquently explains, “these traits were identified after the company learned about the tax incentives available to subsidize the project, the lack of unions and other employment options in the area…” (Nakamura, 935). Thus, while on the base surface the whole project was seen in one light, Nakamura urges us to realize and understand the “cultural” rhetoric adopted for the exploitation of the fact that there was a lack of jobs for Navajo women.
This article comes from the tradition of critical theory, calling for us to look beyond the commonalities of the digital field and see this labor for what it is, digital manufacture, not an innate part of the “Indian psyche.”