People and Technology - New York Times

Photo

Credit John Gall

WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION
How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
By Cathy O’Neil
259 pp. Crown, $26.

O’Neil’s book offers a frightening look at how algorithms are increasingly regulating people. A Ph.D. in math from Harvard, she’s also worked as a Wall Street quant. Her knowledge of the power and risks of mathematical models, coupled with a gift for analogy, makes her one of the most valuable observers of the continuing weaponization of big data.

Her central complaint is that of all the ways organizations use data, there is a pernicious subset — the W.M.D.s of the title — that are opaque, operate at enormous scale and can damage people’s lives. Her first case study is the financial crisis of 2008, kicked off by mathematical models of mortgage payments that were precise, complex and disastrously wrong.

Algorithms have these same effects in teacher evaluations, hiring practices, college admissions. Often, what an organization cares about — job performance, recidivism — can’t be measured directly, so imperfect proxies are used. Credit scores, for example, stand in for employee worth.

O’Neil does offer some design principles for better algorithms, like adding feedback loops that adjust to past mistakes. But like many books that diagnose social risks, the section on solutions is weaker than the illustration of the problem. Understanding just how big the problem is, though, is critical, and O’Neil does a masterly job explaining the pervasiveness and risks of the algorithms that regulate our lives.

Photo

PINPOINT
How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds
By Greg Milner
316 pp. Norton, $27.95.

Milner offers an informative look at the Global Positioning System (GPS to you and me), describing its invention, its spread, and the effects of allowing anyone with a cheap device to find both location and route, anywhere on the planet.

GPS is so obviously useful, and generally works so well, that it has gone from futuristic to boring in a historical eye blink. Milner wants to rescue GPS from its own commercial success; to marvel at the amazing work that went into creating it; and to inquire about its various implications, both good and bad.

Continue reading the main story

He approaches this topic first historically, then analytically. The book’s first part discusses why wayfinding is hard, and how the American military came to operate a network of satellites to do just that, worldwide. But without a central figure or narrative to drive the history, this section ends up feeling diffuse.

When Milner describes the practical effects of suddenly always knowing where you are, the book gains force. He covers an impressive array of uses, from criminal surveillance to beet farming. The discussion of “Death by GPS,” where people blithely drive into terrible trouble because GPS says to, is gripping and horrifying. “Pinpoint” excels when it makes clear that GPS is an engineering marvel, a global utility and a source of new threat all at once.

WASTING TIME ON THE INTERNET
By Kenneth Goldsmith
247 pp. Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.

In “Wasting Time on the Internet,” Goldsmith denies that’s what we’re doing when that’s clearly what we’re doing. Goldsmith, who teaches at Penn and is MoMA’s first poet laureate, emphasizes the connections and surprises inherent in seemingly aimless digital exploration.

Goldsmith’s premise is simple: “Our devices might be changing us, but to say that they’re dehumanizing us is simply wrong.” Here Goldsmith relies most on personal observation. A man mocked for ignoring a stunning moonrise while texting his lover replies, “I can see the moon anytime, but this is the only time I can be having this conversation.” Goldsmith’s ­sister-in-law takes away his nephew’s phone, to make him experience real life, only to discover he can’t make plans with friends, because she’s taken away his phone.

His other core theme is that just because the internet is unfamiliar, it is not on that account unprecedented. Goldsmith links contemporary work with past, blowing past the usual troika of McLuhan, Warhol and Borges to discuss Cézanne, Alberti and Dziga Vertov. Observations about information overload bring in Descartes as a witness. An analogy to the cloud of data we trail behind compares us to Pig-Pen. All of this is wonderful, if you like your connections eclectic and your narrative discursive. “Wasting Time on the Internet” is as aleatory as a fall into the Wikipedia hole.

UTOPIA IS CREEPY
And Other Provocations
By Nicholas Carr
360 pp. Norton, $26.95.

Carr is the dean of technology skeptics, having risen to general public prominence with his 2008 essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This is a new collection of pieces written over the last decade or so. Most are taken from his blog, Rough Type, with about a dozen from other outlets.

Like any collection of timely dispatches, some are too “of the moment.” Arguments about Second Life and Myspace feel like Quemoy and Matsu, once vital, now trivia. Others are startlingly prescient: “Should the Net Forget” (2007) helped kick off the debate about the right to be forgotten; “The Hierarchy of Innovation” (2012) remains a key text in the argument about the value of new digital tools.

Carr’s natural length is the essay. The best material here is the longest, because his core commitment is not denunciation but reframing. “Long Player,” his 2007 argument about the album format as an aesthetic unit, is subtle and capacious. (I have publicly disagreed with some of its conclusions, but am better for having read it. Carr also takes lively issue with some of my ideas in the 2008 essay “Gilligan’s Web.”)

Then there’s “The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows,” for my money the best essay Carr has ever written. The piece contains the thesis for much of his work: “Technology is a pillar and a glory of civilization. But it is also a test that we set for ourselves.” Carr’s great concern is wondering whether we can pass that test.

Continue reading the main story

http://ift.tt/2cYPCGw