The Danger of Biased Artificial Intelligence

The World According to AI – Episode 2 The Bias in the Machine

Al Jazeera (2019)

Film Review

This documentary examines how drone algorithms the US military developed for the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen (see Civilian Drone Strikes: Targeted by Algorithm) are being rolled out by urban police. Because these law enforcement algorithms are based on faulty data, they disproportionately target the poor and minorities. Because these particular zip codes are already over-policed, they provide the vast majority of data used in creating new algorithms.

What the filmmakers find particularly alarming is that many of the same algorithms are used to make bail decisions, sentencing recommendations and credit scores, as well as determining eligibility for state housing and other benefits.

The filmmakers visit Skid Road, the second most policed area in the world, after Baghdad. Owing to the current housing crisis, it hosts a massive homeless population, most of whom are either Black or disabled. The reason Skid Row is so heavily policed is because Skid Row borders on the wealthy Los Angeles financial district. One Skid Row woman has been arrested 108 times for sitting or lying on the sidewalk.

The US military also uses Skid Row population to test new spy software.

The Internet: Good, Bad and Ugly

Lo and Behold Reveries of the Connected World

Directed by Werner Herzog (2016)

Film Review

This is a wide ranging review of benefits and drawbacks of the Internet. The documentary begins by examining how the Internet was gradually created nearly a decade before the first personal computers came to market. During the 1960s, dozens of (mainly government) computers were linked up to communicate with one another. Then in 1969, UCLA joined all the networks together to create the Internet.

The film goes on to reveal how the Internet makes higher education available to hundreds of thousands of low income people, as well as enabling scientists to use the creativity of hundreds of thousands of Internet users to unlock secrets of complex biologic molecules. There are also interesting segments on the use of Internet technology in driverless cars and AI-based robots.

On the darker side are patients suffering from EMF sensitivity disorder, who are forced to seek out the EMF-free zone in Greenbank, West Virginia.* And people seeking treatment for Internet addiction at a Rehab Center near Seattle. I was surprised to learn of video gamers who wear diapers to facilitate their their 40-60 hour marathons. According to Herzog, gamers in Korea have died at their computer when they became too engrossed to eat or drink.

Herzog also investigates the threat periodic solar flares pose to the Internet – and potentially to civilization itself, given that so much of modern infrastructure relies on the Internet.

For me, the segment on hacking is the most interesting part of the film, featuring an interview with the world’s preeiminent hacker Kevin Mitnick. This section segways into an examination of cyberwarfare. The latter, which tends to level the playing field between large and small nations, is rapidly replacing conventional warfare.

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*Greenbank is a 100 square mile area surrounding an extremely sensitive radio telescope collecting radio signals from outer space.

The film can’t be embedded for copyright reasons, but can be viewed at the Maori TV website for the next two weeks: Lo and Behold the Reveries of the Connected World