2091 – Ascension/登楼叹 (documentary 2021 )

spacetime coordinates: early 21st c China

directed by Chinese-American producer & director Jessica Kingdon

produced by Kira Simon-Kennedy and Nathan Truesdell

music: Dan Deacon

“The film follows the Chinese dream (中国梦) through the social classes, prioritizing productivity and innovation.” (wiki)

According to an opinion piece published on Qiushi (the leading official theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist Party), the Chinese Dream is about “Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism, and national glory”.

I am going to jot down a few quick thoughts after a fresh viewing of the new immersive documentary made by Jessica Kingdon – as it is one of the best recent documentaries about China. When one sez “China” one should be very skeptical – since the whole topic is now politically and emotionally charged. There are stakes on all sides from a growing quite dangerous sinophobia, discrimination, and racism against people of Asian origin around the world. There are many points of contention and everything feels to add to the previous biases – including accusations of alleged forced ‘sinicization’ of minorities, crackdowns and labor camps for ethnic Uyghur minority in Xinjiang & minority religious groups (especially Moslems), a crackdown on HK (one country two systems), fears over Taiwan, the continuing debate surrounding zoonotic spillover event at the wet market in Wuhan including the Biden’s administration recent military buildup as a response to both Russia & China. One should never make a sandwich out of these separate issues. The most dangerous at the time I think is the old imperial ‘Unipolar Moment’ US-led saber-rattling. Warmongering is hot at the moment, the old frames don’t help and what we are living is not a new Cold War but more of ‘hot peace times’ (as Zizek put it in long-read about the war in Ukraine) where inflammatory rhetoric covers up a much more mundane & business as usual reality. That said, Zizek himself has been a strong critic of what he used to call in an Al-Jazeera interview the (non-)alternative to the English neoliberalism “Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values”. No matter of you call it that or “State-led capitalism with Confucian Characteristics” (as Chinese themselves sometimes prefer), there is a lot more to be said and I don’t think one can have a monolithic position at this shifting crossroad, especially when China is the only contending world power that still believes in some form of multilateralism & noncynical win-win globalism. In the West, it becomes easier and easier to dismiss or ignore the diversity of the contemporary ideological field in China, including its various currents and countercurrent of orthodox or heterodox economical thought that have shaped and continue to influence its policy issues today.

What is clear is that Chinese media is being too easily labeled nowadays as “state-affiliated” media as if the western media is free of any affiliations or strings attached. In response we should label various western media outlets, Twitter now as Musk-affiliated or Bezos-affiliated (Washington Post) media. I find this a ridiculous hyperbole, an example of shameful double standard, a forgetfulness by Big Tech that is trying to rebrand itself as ‘national asset’ in the New Cold War. Apart from a divergence explained by commercial rivalries, there’s a lack of social media overlap btw Big Tech and local Chinese tech companies and platforms explained by the specifics of China’s ‘Ascension’ since the 1970s libéralisation and gradual opening towards today’s economic modernisation. Chinese innovation is thriving today because of this wise divergence in policy – they learned to exist and develop because the Big Tech was regulated by the Chinese state giving local startups a chance in the face of the Californian tech behemoths. So this disconnect has been partially useful and intentional +yet we’re living a cultural-linguistic & EuroAmerican – centric disconnect from the Sinosphere (the online world of wechat, Douyin, Weibo, Bilibili and more) – insuring a lot of misunderstandings and the usual faux pas. Purging the US. academia & technoscience as a response to current strategic realignment & divestment is not the answer (without considering the “role of firms from core capitalist countries in industrial relocation to and foreign direct investment in the PRC“). Not that social media can ever clarify anything, even while it vows to filter disinformation – it’s just that one can only see the big bubble of the others, not one’s own… There are many post-digital folklore anthropologists and social media sociologists and documentarists changing all this and I am grateful to them. While at official levels (policy, diplomacy, politics) there is this monologue about US-Chinese decoupling, ‘new cold war’ dangers, economic nationalism, the ground level transitioning away from a unipolar (US-centered) world requires both artistic & documentarian skills – since there are preciously few bridges. Otherwise, we will fail miserably, being blind to how interconnected things are or what kind of East-West dialectics is there afoot.

China is understandably wary of any Western involvement in its internal affairs and has sound historical reasons for that, yet it also tries to diversify its own exterior presentation & identity, while being at the same time busy solving its national (internal) unprecedented problems (slowing economy, aging population, ecological green energy transition, cracking down on tech giants, regulating & curbing the real estate boom + the managing its worst COVID lockdown crisis yet). Whether we understand, empathize or not, 21st c China is in a continuous dialogue with the outside world. China knows what it has to face, no matter what skeptics are saying. It also tries to do something nobody ever tried in the history of humanity, to take seriously all these challenges and not be cynical about it or over-confident. China is not trying to lay low and double down, pretend they’re not there and just let a few reap the benefits of “disruption” or Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (like the 2008 Crisis bailouts have demonstrated again and again).

Ascension – tries to fill this gap in many ways. It shows a diversified, socially ebullient world. It’s full of invisible overwork, myriad supply chains and also of fantastic vistas, and yes a billion dreams, wishes, artificial worlds, constant promotional feeds and the so-called “fan economy” or Wanghong economy of internet fame (like one of the Chinese streamer turned personal brand trainers sez in the docu). Ascension – the title has some religious ring to it – yet this is a very secular bootstrapping effort. It is zooming in on various, very difficult & still evolving aspects (from factory work to leisure, from previous external export orientation to internal markets) without transforming them into nefarious dystopian verdicts or snark remarks. Skills and tutorials seem to pervade this offline to online fluidity – people are constantly speaking into phones, recording DIY ads utilizing a mobile phone & selfie stick, pampering their image, making photo shoots, posting or making product placement, or learning how to promote their personal brand and train themselves into possible jobs and life choices while confronted with immense pressures to be materially successful and be a ‘super boss’ (garner fans) not just a boss (a boss without fans). One can see a much more accelerated version of Western neoliberalism, yet one can also see more experimentation – vernacular digitalisation, tryout of everything available. The movie does not comment or deconstruct. It does not ignore the whole breath of experiences and it also does not try to be exhaustive (how could it be in a billion people strong country?). Everything is spaced out, has a unreal feeling and this whole ecosystem of online Chinese celebs – influencers, gamers and consumer culture leadership seminars might be repulsive or feel oddly hyper-consumerist yet it is only part of the story. It all starts with what is lacking in most accounts of China – its migrant worker population (about 130+ million strong) being called by Foxconn recruiters on buses. These workers are the workers that have been most affected by the current lockdown. Workers doing highly repetitive work in the shop floor of the world, considered extinct (or unacceptable) in the West (old Fordist conveyor belts) while also watching soaps on their phones online.

From amazing (both toxic fume and surreal) scenes inside sex-doll factories to simple plastic bottle’s water filling to thousands of bikes, everything gets some form of coverage. It also records the in between talks of workers & managers, talk about ghosts in factories, fengshui swords, fragments and daily bits of “chit-chat”, people tired, nervous, janitors having small naps during work, getting an electric massage and training to become shock workers or bodyguards or butlers to the new well-off China’s rich. There is an intensity that is hard to convey, and there is a sort of exuberance & non-innocence that seems to go along with ‘working hard & party hard’.

I think it is completely wrong and foolish to focus on China mimesis of the West, this is completely the wrong alley for me. There is something else afoot and this documentary proves it. My deepest impressions are somehow turning around learning (the bad and the good, almost like throwing back in the face of the West its own Western superfluous étiquette or witnessing such a dedication for the basics of Western literacy). The very fact is that the people of China of all classes want internationalism, are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, and are more than ever wooing the West. Are people in the West doing the same? Are they even putting an ounce of effort or interests to see beyond their ‘big noses’? I don’t think so.

What is important here is that it is not just an individual ordinary effort or state -sponsored or party led one – it is almost a communal effort to enjoy the newfound place on the international world & probe, go crazy with the incredible affordances that it’s hard to match – expanding infrastructure is offering (railroads, trains, IT, AR, online AI assisted tech, face recognition, virtual pay systems, QR core everything) water park arena events (simultaneously) with efforts to get better at everything – to learn everything, from science & tech to good manners to simple basic behaviors as useless (?) as smiling exercises or the ‘Western business étiquette hugging’. Let them hug you and hug them back as softly or strongly as they do!

That said – I would have liked more palpable experience of China’s vast new networks of public transport or its actual Research & Development ‘business parks’, incubators – all the state-private technoscientific capabilities (including its space exploration program) or the biomedical advances. There were snippets of subcultural milieus – yet this was indeed explored elsewhere in some detail(thinking of the amazing Shamate that I still haven’t seen). Also would have liked to see more about internal tourism -even its red tourism.

1852 – Coded Bias (documentary by Shalini Kantayya 2020)

official

“When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.”

This is probably one of the most important documentaries to address many issues that are not any longer strictly the domain of SF. Cod Bias is definitely within the bounds of any socially inflected SF worlds u can think of. Maybe it used to be just the figment of dystopian – Cold War tinged imagination, but now it is very much part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit theat primordial Silicon Valley 1984 promo – the ad for Apple Macintosh PC released in December 1983. Feels puzzling how this new televised technological muscle was part of a much wider and concerted Reaganite response to the -(still) Socialist East. ‘Free World’ computing as easily turned and facing off the eponymous Orwellian 1984 villain, a drab, grey, docile citizenry of the standardized monolithic solid-state, the ideological ‘other’ where a repressive & monstrous surveillance apparatus – (be it Securitate/Stasi) enforced obedience & ‘rightminding’. Only that, in retrospect, the newly competitive Silicon Valley product was a launch-pad for a much wider privacy Dragnet and much more insidious scope and certainly fancier in looks & design. Buying into a system of personal, automated & generalized consumer surveillance that also brought the pretense of neutral, un-biased coding.

Coded Bias documentary is the strongest advocacy of algorithmic justice i have seen, watched or heard of. A critical introduction to the current algo-capitalistic trends & as well as some of the ways needed to counter act AI-supported disparities & disenfranchisement. It is no mystery that you actually need people from across the board, including industry ppl (call them what u want, ex- Quants/former flash trading brokers, tech renegades, whistle-blowers, technological deserters, industry watchdogs, etc). Yes, not only EFF members, STEMs, geeks and blerds, but also people from the social housing blocks, the hood, the street corner youngsters and those with migrant-background – those that are primary targets and have been already mis-measured, data stripped and data mined and whose bodies and faces are literally the training grounds of computational modernity. Most of them, are the unwilling informants and unpaid trainers of emerging tech deployments that under-girds surveillance capitalism.

One of the most important takes from this documentary – was for me the counter-intuitive demonstration that goes against old cyberpunk sayings (paraphrasing: ‘the future is already here but it is just unequally distributed’). In the 21st c we learn time and time again, that the 1%, or 10% or the rich, powerful and wealthy are not the future’s bleeding knife- since they have mostly lived live of unfettered privacy and non data retention. They are not a tested minority, and clearly not the ones who get first unwanted access beforehand and do not suffer the effects of those things that will get distributed later one a vast scale. In fact (as one of the participants of Coded Bias points out) – the post-apocalyptic poor, the unprotected, those with previous histories of discrimination, enslavement, incarceration, abusive family background, profiling etc those already under some state of surveillance, registration and control (ID checked mostly in terms of constituting some form of risk), are the ones who suffer the blunt of these new technologies.

They are the un-glamorized testers of unequal futures, and not the privileged rich beta testers that mostly seem to opt-out of their own companies technological wonders. Accordingly, technological transformation is so important that it should not be defined just in terms of access – or left at the whim of company board members, Big Tech, Innovation hubs or ‘smart’ city planners & cheerleaders. It is not just a question of ‘users’ – since it is about the ‘used’ more than the users nowadays. It is – without nostalgia or pre-technological naivity in tow, that in spite – of these tremendous and complex planetary changes, legislation and lobbying for digital rights & accountability seems to lag behind, since both public attention and consciousnesses gets bypassed. Direct oversight and regulation or consciousness itself seems so trivial, and yet it is constantly remade into a threshold to be bypassed by the free markets & mantras hailing for ‘disruptive’ transgressions. Nonetheless, there is this incredible alliance and (as seen below) a lot of initiatives have sprung up, that espouse not just a neo-Luddite conviction, but one of tekk-savvyness, informed by the above ‘renegades’and industry insiders and/or burnouts as well, by previous historical black liberation examples as by the new empowering SF alternate histories (i see some clear signs of Wakanda there) having been written (thinking about Solomon Rivers,Nalo Hopkins and Nisi Shawl & others here) or waiting to be written in collaboration with automated text generators or not.

There is emerging calls from both government and by popular demand to at least be able to opt-out of these technologies in the US and EU (face recognition being just the most obvious case), altough I’m not sure about the vast majority of the world (which is clearly not from the Global North) or even the accelerating use & deployment of drone wars & DARPA abroad in the wake of protracted but inevitable US retreat from Afghanistan. There of course the possibility to learn how optical governance works or is put to use/abused in other parts of the world, since the West does not hold the monopoly over AI. China, in particular is an interesting divergence, since machine vision has been widely rolled out by the CCP via its social credit score, as well as being repurposed from below during the Pandemic response. SF has been historically very wary with attempts to modulate or influence behaviors such as behaviourism, to tuning or pegging controls or strong emotional responses towards a common good (Just think of swath of movies from Equilibrium 2002 to Brave New World 2020 or the new Voyagers 2021). ‘Brainwashed’, ‘the Manchurian Candidate’ etc are just a few of the inherited standard fear responses churned by both Cold War warriors, strategists, Pentagon brass and the run of the mill Hollywood movie output whenever they tried to depict or describe actual, imagined or suspected ideological traitors and US army deserters. ‘Brainwashing’ especially was made up into a sort of explain-all – to cover a whole range of ‘enemy'(past & present) responses, as the only possible logical explanation for the divergent behavior of former US troops (many of them black) who decided to opt-out of the racist US capitalist system after living as POW (during Korean War). When former army personnel decided to question, defect & live outside their bounds they must have been ‘brainwashed’, especially if they happened to be choosing Mao’s China for a while (a forgotten history detailed with tremendous wit in Julia Lowell’s fascinating book: Maoism: A Global History 2020) instead of racism back home or in the army. Change of mind and qualms about incoming orders also equals treason as we know from the case of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning or Edward Snowden.

In a rare and courageous move – The White Space (Machine/Ancestral Night duology) space opera universe of Elizabeth Bear avoids the usual ‘brainwashing’ suspicion of previous SF dystopian conventions by offering exactly what so much canonic SF eschews. It opens the possibility of a wide, non-coercive future galactic union where every human (altough the union is made by many non-sapient but sentient syster species) has the option to decide how much it alters, allows or wants to dial-down or fine-tune (what amounts to certain AI assisted ‘mindfulness’) a central nervous system evolved to automatize responses to emotional distress. Changing developmental patterns etc including universal non-coercive(!) access (called “bumping” in the novel) to what amounts to puberty blockers is not automatically a bad thing or a monstrous unnatural hybristic act(altough there’s libertarian privateers who think so in that universe like in ours)!

White Space opens up a way to modulate, discuss and deal in other ways with trauma, isolation, addiction, puberty, dysphoria, sex or gender assignment by birth etc bypassing automatic, hormonal or non-cognitive ‘habitual’ responses, being able to imaginatively limit violent behaviors at a minimum. Curbing willingly so much of what is anti-social behavior was apparently frowned upon even in that far future, but there’s room for so much more. It’s of course always important to pay attention to who decides what and when one misbehaves or when disobedience becomes accepted & when not. Of course there is a thin line, and there are those who want to skip and actively propagate opting out of the opting out. Body (non modification) extremists surely exist in that future that deem it sacrilegious to intervene or to dabble with ‘natural’ responses, while acting (on whole) quite egoistically and self-centered. In this galactic union – new forms of piratical freeports keep offshoring resources and escaping the central taxing authority, thus harboring non-mindfulness terrorism arising in response to a largely benefic mental & emotional tuning widely available. Even if coding bias into hardware based on white wetware bias is the main focus of Coded Bias, it ultimately supports a malleable wetware-hardware continuum that allows for modulation and even requires it.

Black-boxing of the operative logics of machine vision or acknowledging that machinic cognition or decisionality is essentially collaborative, not isolated, nor impervious to questioning, thus, cannot just settle for the human/nonhuman or creator/created, nonhuman/posthuman binaries. It feels very wrong, since it closes down our own sensitivity either to the same old repackaged as new, or to a newer wider & largely collaborative nonhuman ‘worldy sensiblity’ that is always risks being tipped towards whiteness and reactive toxicity if left unattended. Microsoft’s Tay 2016 chatbot that developed 24h a proclivity for hate speech is a test in case. It’s not just the simple powerful logic of trash in trash out, but of how easily this tipping point might be achieved today under trolling & targeted attacks. At the same time, one should never loose sight of other machinic bridges &conceptually as well as emotionally more progressive examples that developed as part of writing practices & modernist techniques such as automatic writing or Alan Turing’s automated Loveletter generator.

One cannot unbox anything in a straightforward way, since Shalini Kantayya’s diverse cast of protagonists and invited guests make clear that not even programmers or makers do not understand how the AI does what it does. One more thing cannot be remedied with just more data, simply more information. Even acknowledging that we can fully understand those internal processes, we can still feel trh results, see the hard facts and harsh reality whenever these AIs tend to ignore black and brown or female faces. AIs do need some deep unlearning in order to ‘re-educate'(not such a bad word) themselves and make sure they will not act out just the mathematical sums of the worst of the worst and select by default for the chosen few while deselecting everybody else.

Pushing the logic of this documentary, it is time to find out more about how decisions, ‘chance’, contingency may still be directed so as to redistribute luck on a more equal way in an increasingly unequal world economy. Economy is itself futurism served frozen & pre-cooked, and different debt ridden lives and widely different futures are being handed down, bent along pre-selected trajectories, trajectories that are being doctored (who cares if knowingly or unknowingly, intentionality is always ulterior anyway) actively make impossible the lives of a majority. A ‘pan-selectivity’ needs yo be developed that refuses yo be ‘gamed’ easily and influenced only by the influent few armed with predictive algorithms – at the tip of a capitalistic drive that actualizes every potential out there, no matter how horrific and brutal as long as it pays dividends.

Like probably any ideological formation – bias is not just invisible, it probably maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but this should not stop us trying to change it and actively imagine what’s to be done. Bias seems to work and act by being unspecified, invisibilized, left out of the loop. Again, like ideology, it is the missing mass that bends everything according to its set of preemptive expectations, almost like a constant enactment of a single, unilateral inner experience, making itself ubiquitous. Bias is not simply an apparently whimsical conceit, it is not just a pre-programmed part of the system, but something that needs to be enforced, hard-coded and programmed at every level of future decision making, at ever threshold of resistance.

Bias is made seemingly non-existent each time output and prediction is put at a premium. If if blaring, it feels like an itch you cannot scratch, because it starts to seem so intrinsic & para-systemic. Technology or AI is not neutral nor is inherently bad it gas been often said, and it is getting as bad or worse or as good as the whole context/environment allows it, or the drift promoting it keeps on pushing it, or as long as the coded ideals and values are what they are. Remember even if everything is being turned into ‘driver-less’-everything, it’s not less of driven- market economy.

We can not see it and measure it because its effects are measured on those who are made to matter less and less, on those ‘others’ that even the states, law or constitution does not seem to ‘notice’ or care for any longer. It is easier to wave bias aside, to bring undigested misconstructions on board and heap them on top of those being distributed the loosing lots, the bad seats(if any), and even if those stories just give you bad dreams, goosebumps, depression or severe need to disconnect from another’s catastrophic or already dystopian reality. So this necessitates different, collective and directed research approaches & coordinated effort to ‘black boxing’ so many current decisional processes. There’s also a different venue (not tackled in Coded Bias) – a sort of related QWERTY bias, of path dependencies whenever we have historically & incrementally built conventional (man-made) computational infrastructures. This ‘convention’ not only only stands in the way of more evolutionary – developmentally inclusive, unconventional approaches to computation & computing, but might leave out or blind us to other venues or other modes of problem solving existing or evolved (as those investigated by Andrew Adamatsky studying maze-solving slime molds). While most computation & research nowadays follows old & certainly well-tested arhitectures, it only builds upon existing & specific constraints – all too human ones we might add, moreover a very restrictive & biased account of what counts as ‘human’ (amply documented throughout Coded Bias), one that both engineering and coding seems to take as granted. ‘Worth’ – in a constantly devalorizing environment becomes constantly threatened, at the same time we should welcome the erosion of old, gendered biased and individualistic notions of singular genius(unmoved mover?) and farcical ‘great men’ through our plural AI – human interactions.

Coded Bias gets the highest marks in advocating for an A.I.X -research, attempting to build an explainable artificial intelligence, a research that should be aware of ‘artificial unintelligence'(Meredith Broussard), as well as to demands that humans hone their response-ability (Haraway), both allowing for aesthetic, epistemologic and ethical responsiveness whenever technological 21st upgrades and optimizations start pouring in.

Algorithmic Justice League (AJL)

AJL TW

AI fairness 360

Big Brother Watch UK

Algorithmic Equity Toolkit

Recidivism Risk Assessment

Association for Computing Machinery code of ethics

Silicon Valley Rising

Critical Race and Digital Studies Syllabus

No Biometric Barriers Housing Act of 2019

A Toolkit on Organizing Your Campus against ICE

stopping big data plan to flag at risk students

Responsible Computing Science Challenge

Hacking Discrimination hackaton

Protest Surveillance: Protect Yourself toolkit from Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) for safety recommendations

AI Now Institute at New York University is a research center dedicated
to understanding the social implications of AI.

Fight for the Future is a group of artists, activists, engineers, and technologists
advocating for the use of technology as a liberating force.

Our Data Bodies is a human rights and data justice organization.

Data & Society studies the social implications of data-centric technologies & automation.

AJL logo

You do not need to be a tech expert to advocate for algorithmic justice. These basic terms are a good foundation to inform your advocacy. For a more detailed breakdown of how facial recognition works, see the guide titled Facial Recognition Technologies: A Primer from the AJL. For more on surveillance, see the Community Control Over Police Surveillance: Technology 101 guide from the ACLU.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS (extracted from Coded Bias Activist Toolkit)

Algorithm. A set of rules used to perform a task.

Algorithmic justice. Exposing the bias and harms from technical systems in order to safeguard the most marginalized and develop equitable, accountable, and just artificial intelligence.

Benchmark. Data set used to measure accuracy of an algorithm before it is released.

Bias. Implicit or explicit prejudices in favor of or against a person or groups of
people.

Artificial intelligence (AI). The quest to give computers the ability to perform
tasks that have, in the past, required human intelligence like decision making,
visual perception, speech recognition, language translation, and more.

Big data. The mass collection of information about individuals who
use personal technology, such as smartphones.

Biometric technology. Uses automated processes to recognize an individual through unique physical characteristics or behaviors

Black box. A system that can be viewed only through its inputs and outputs, not its internal process.

CCTV. Closed-circuit television cameras are used by institutions to record activity on and around their premises for security purposes.

Civil rights. A broad set of protections designed to prevent unfair treatment or
discrimination in areas such as education, employment, housing, and more.

Code. The technical language used to write algorithms and other computer programs.

Data rights. Referring to the human right to privacy, confidentiality, and
ethical use of personal information collected by governments or corporations through technology

Data set. The collection of data used to train an algorithm to make predictions.

Due process. The right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without
proper legal proceedings, protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.

General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR). A data rights law in the European Union that requires technology users consent to how their data is collected and prohibits the sale of personal data.

Facial recognition. Technologies – a catchall phrase to describe a set of technologies that process imaging data to perform a range of tasks on human
faces, including detecting a face, identifying a unique individual, and assessing demographic attributes like age and gender.

Machine learning. An approach to AI that provides systems the ability to learn
patterns from data without being explicitly programmed.

Racism. The systematic discrimination of people of color based on their social
classification of race, which disproportionately disadvantages Black and
Indigenous people of color.

Recidivism risk assessment – Automated decision making system used in
sentencing and probation to predict an individual’s risk of future criminal behavior based on a series of data inputs, such as zip code and past offenses.

Sexism. The systematic discrimination of women and girls based on their social
categorization of sex, which intersects with racism for women and girls of color.

Social credit score. An AI system designed by the Communist Party of China
that tracks and analyzes an individual’s data to assess their trustworthiness.

Surveillance. The invasive act of monitoring a population to influence its
behavior, done by a government for law and order purposes or by corporations for commercial interests.

Value-added assessments. Algorithms used most commonly to evaluate teachers by measuring student performance data.

Voice recognition. An application of AI technology that interprets and carries out spoken commands and/or aims to identify an individual based on their speech patterns.

imdb

1851 – books mentioned in the Coded Bias documentary

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

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