Technochauvinism

 

As human beings, our role in the technological world cannot be downplayed. While high-tech computers have the power to make complex calculations that humans cannot, we must remember that it is humans that feed it this data in the first place and if one piece of information is left out, the output is automatically flawed. The computer cannot fix itself the way a human being can heal when injured. As I was taught in my computer studies class in secondary school, “Garbage in, garbage out."

 Not only are we not the same, but we are also superior.  How can the created be greater than the creator? Techno chauvinism might falsely make us believe that technology in the form of Artificial Intelligence is more superior to humans. Unfortunately, it is against this back drop that Ayn Randian meritocracy- techno libertarian political values exist. Meredith Brousard in her book “Artificial Unintelligence, How Computers Misunderstand the world,” states that under this mindset, “celebrating free speech to the extent of denying that online harassment is a problem” occurs. Since I began to study online speech, I have struggled with this view which I see inherent in a lot of court opinions and analyses, so I am glad to now learn the term used to describe it.

Technology is not bad. But bearing in mind that it is we humans that feed data to the technology, what are the consequences of the data we feed it? What ethical considerations do we make anytime we want to post something online? From the angry ex-boyfriend about to post nonconsensual intimate images of his girlfriend, to the new site that is about to make a defamatory post about someone. As humans, we often bring the erroneous side of out human nature to the virtual world to punish, gossip and abuse, leaving good manners and ethics in the physical realm.

Further, when developing new technology, what are the values we embed in it? Are we human-assistance focused or human-replacement focused? Is there an obsession towards pumping the new car with all the latest engineering as a techno chauvinist might do, or are we focused on what is best for humans? Is a car that allows all kinds of appliances to function while a person drives better than a car blocks out calls while driving? Clearly the one that enables safer driving is better and more human focused. My Samsung phone has a feature called “Focus mode.” When I enable it, it blocks all other apps from functioning except those I specifically choose to allow, for as long as I want. I confess I don’t always use it, but when I do, I honestly get more work done. I believe this is human focused technology, the manufacturers of my phone sat down and realized that.

Another critical issue is the existence of bias in algorithms. Who is feeding the machines these data? what data are the machines being fed? And what are the implications? Biased data has very serious consequences. For instance, if a face recognition software cannot properly recognize or differentiate one black male from another, then police software used to identify suspects could wrongly identify a wrong black man for a crime. This is a real story. In this case, the police so believed in the infallibility of the facial recognition technology that they refused to listen to the unfortunate suspect’s very credible alibi (an instance of Technochauvinism).  But why did the facial recognition software do this? Who fed the algorithms to the software? What races were included in the data? A computer is not a human being. There is a limit to what it can process. If you feed it insufficient or zero data on how to recognize a particular race it will either not recognize that race at all or do a terrible job identifying people within that race. There must be inclusivity in the people choosing the data and diversity in the data subject to produce unbiased result.  Remember, “Garbage in, Garbage out!”