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The Book of the Week is “Weapons of Math Destruction, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy” by Cathy O’Neil, first published in 2016.
This hodgepodge of a volume pointed out the dangers of Big Data, whose name has been changed to AI. The software that collects data and does number-crunching that results in harm– the author calls “weapons of math destruction” or WMDs. Since the book’s writing, ALL aspects of Americans’ lives have been taken over by AI. The author provided several real-life examples of groupthink and herd mentality that has led to a toxic loop of self-deception and cluster-screwups.
The three elements of WMDs are: damage, scaling and opacity.
In software engineering, the cliche, “Garbage in, garbage out” means that a flawed process that generates inaccurate data (garbage) will result in an end-product of inaccurate data (garbage). When AI models collect data on a small number of people, and those data are extrapolated to an entire applicable population (“scaling”), there can be honest ineptitude or even malice; numerous additional people’s lives can be adversely affected. The software models used are opaque because they are considered trade secrets or intellectual property. Of course, maximizing profits is the number one goal of AI makers.
The author discussed the subprime mortgage crisis that resulted in the 2008 financial crash. In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed. The repeal allowed banks to enter the securities business. The securities-ratings services went hog-wild in their quest to collect huge fees from banks, labeling high-risk securities as the opposite of what they really were, while the banks bet against the very same securities they’d sold to their customers.
These perpetrators poisoned the well for everyone, so that new laws were enacted that made it more expensive for financially responsible, law-abiding people to apply for mortgages going forward.
In the 2010’s, students in Zhongxiang in China were slated to take the national standardized university entrance exam. There had been a crackdown on cheating. Approximately two thousand students protested outside their school, shouting “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you don’t let us cheat.”
American politics is currently witnessing this kind of unmitigated lawlessness and hubris. It waxes and wanes through decades, but now it is more extreme than ever because:
- Since the 2008 financial crash, the profiteers’ wealth has been compounding, which has increased its power, as money is power.
- The “president” (who some would argue is a dictator) is entrenched with the legal system.
- Previous administrations were neither as litigious nor as driven to stay in power forever by rigging everything (including but far from limited to: a blood-for-oil war, insider trading, redistricting, launching smear campaigns against all enemies, sweetheart contracts with political donors, etc., etc., etc.).
Here is one last example of how poor Americans were the victims of expensive stupidity: Between 2013 and 2015, a deeply flawed AI system that screened unemployment-benefits recipients in the state of Michigan, wrongly accused 93% of the recipients of waste, fraud or abuse.
Read the book to learn about many more examples of the Orwellian juggernaut AI has become.