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By Neeraj Nanda
MELBOURNE, 12 April 2021: During the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union (now Russia) spied on each other and on their own citizens as the ideological paranoia reached its heights. It might be history, but the new cold war between the US and China and within many countries, technology has taken over as the driving force of gathering information and analyzing data to counter a global adversary or regulate people’s behavior and controlling the socio-economic scenario.
Director-Producer Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias (1 hour 25 minutes) documentary will open your eyes to the unregulated abuse being perpetrated by the big nine companies (six American and 3 Chinese) using artificial intelligence (AI) generated algorithms that control our lives.
Wikipedia explains the algorithm as, ” In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions, typically to solve a class of problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are always unambiguous and are used as specifications for performing calculations, data processing, automated reasoning, and other tasks.”
The documentary exposes the AI-powered algorithms that control facial recognition technology used in many countries including the US and China.MIT Media-Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini takes us step by step deep into the technological morass along with the writer Cathey O’ Neil
(The Weapon of Math Destruction) and Silkie Carlo (The Big Brother Watch).
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The world is focused on ‘authoritarian’ China using facial recognition tech to control its population but the US law enforcement agencies have more than 100 million people in their databases. The scary technological details dwarf George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) settings.
The most dangerous, the documentary reveals, is algorithms can be wrong and hard on marginalized people. They can perpetuate inherent technological racism which is tough to regulate. Color, race, ethnicity, and gender can get entangled – a danger to civil liberties in every country.
For this Joy wants laws to regulate the dangerous situation. Or, is it too late? The documentary is timely and one needs to ponder the role of out-of-control technology in our lives. It’s time to act.
Well done, Shalini Kantayya. You made us more conscious.
