Author: Ovetta Sampson
Publisher: Medium
Publication Year: 2018
Summary: The following article discusses how bad algorithms compounded with bad actors have caused much technological harm over the past few years. The Facebook Russian Election scandal went through due to Facebook’s “quantitative-quest” focus within its PageRank algorithm, leaving data engineers with no idea about all the prejudices their ads perpetrated. Even worse, these ads were widely circulated, seen over 340 million times. They worked so effectively due to the availability cascade, whereby repeated information is seen as more factual. In addition, Facebook enabled this content to be published and no longer functions as simply a platform. Sampson also cleverly terms artificial intelligence (AI) “Agnostic Innocuousness” because of the fallacy that if there is data, it cannot possess human frailty and bias. To combat this, ethics must be woven into the overall process, using design thinking. The main tenets create content that is transparent, participatory, contextual, sustainable, transformational, and inspiring. Using these as inspiration, she details her 8-point manifesto after, where she proposes to put humans first, protect individual privacy rights, keep anonymity, create safety, deliver equity to protected classes, start with good-intentioned use, emphasize transparency, and and adhere to the spirit of the law.