Month: March 2023

“Algorithms are nothing more than opinions embedded in code.”
(Cathy O’Neil in Talks at Google, 2016)

“A machine-learning algorithm can’t tell the difference between being morally good, neutral or unjust forms of bias, so that’s something humans have to be much more careful about.”
(Shannon Vallor in McRaney, 2018)

The Detain/Release simulation was a fascinating yet unsettling and disturbing task that revealed much about how flawed the judicial system seems to be. 

While going through the simulation, I had many questions and needed more information on individual cases. For example, if the crime was theft, then of what exactly? What was the nature of the robbery? Not all offences are of the same rank, as the case of the 18-year-old who tried to ride a six-year-old’s bicycle to school, demonstrated in the McRaney (2018) podcast. How was the level of expected violence or crime of the defendants determined? What factors determined the recommendations of the prosecution? So much critical information related to the context of these human lives was missing. I also became more acutely aware of my own biases, releasing women (perhaps they were mothers?) and instinctively assuming they were ‘less dangerous’ than men.

Each click to Detain or Release was burdened by the idea that these decisions would have far-reaching effects on real human lives. 

The process raised the question: Can machine code integrate human context and compassion critical to these decision-making processes? The answer is no, so these algorithms must be used cautiously, with wisdom and ethically-guided human supervision.

From the podcasts I listened to this week, much stood out. Now that algorithms are becoming pervasive in virtually every sphere of life, from banking, shopping, policing, and transportation to education etc., then Data Ethics – a super-critical domain today – must be prioritized. Transparency must be demanded. 

“Before we start talking about machine morality, we have to think about human morality, that is, the morality of the people designing the machines..”
(Shannon Vallor in McRaney, 2018)

References:

McRaney, D. (Host). (2018, November 21). Machine Bias (rebroadcast) (no. 140). [Audio podcast episode]. In You Are Not so Smart. SoundCloud. 

Talks at Google. (2016, November 2). Weapons of math destruction | Cathy O’Neil | Talks at Google. [Video]. YouTube.

This was an incredibly frustrating exercise.

Having read and watched the week’s assigned content, I thought I would be up to the task and intuitively knew what was to come; despite this, I was amazed at how infuriated the poorly designed user interface made me feel. As well as the chafing reminder of how much time is wasted navigating such things in real-life scenarios and the manipulative techniques embedded within them.

I attempted the game several times during the week and never finished it despite trying my level best. At first, I thought that was deliberate, and the game was designed to be a never-ending loop of madness and folly upon which to reflect… but hats off to Amy Stiff! When I checked her post for this task, lo and behold, she had finished it! Perhaps others have too (I stopped checking after Amy’s post verified my inadequacy :). This led me firmly to the conviction that I must not be human because that was the stage of the game/task I could not cross – selecting pictures to prove my human-ness.

Completing the form was annoying and frustrating as intended, but also an informative, practical exercise in the dark patterns described by Brignull (2011). I could not help but compare this experience to other online interfaces with similar tactics I had been susceptible to in the past, especially those involving financial transactions.

Misleading buttons, incorrect highlights, dubious language, and hard-to-fill (if not impossible) forms giving no indication or feedback regarding how to proceed or what exactly the problem is.

I found Brignull’s article particularly intriguing because of his references to ethical design. I studied architecture and design in the 90s when design ethics were inseparable from design education and taught integrally within it, never considered outside of it. The default (unchallenged) premise was that designers have a moral responsibility to ensure benefit and not cause harm to their end-users. Tristan Harris (featured this week for his TED talk) worked as a design ethicist at Google (Wikipedia, 2022), and Pickering (2021) writes that a design ethicist is “someone who evaluates the moral implications of design decisions and takes responsibility for the effect those decisions have on the world at large.”

There seems to be a shift in where the weight or responsibility of design ethics lies, and I wonder how and in what ways design education and recent developments within it may have contributed to this transformation.

 

References:

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design.Links to an external site. A List Apart, 338.

Pickering, M. (2021, December 29). How to be a design ethicist at any company – UX Collective. Medium. https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-be-a-design-ethicist-at-any-company-f166b2f34ecd

Wikipedia contributors. (2022, December 4). Tristan Harris. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris

 

(Image: Courtesy NASA/JPL – Caltech).

My main takeaway from this exercise was the crucial reminder that information/knowledge and its presentation is biased, curated and limited. 

As reminded earlier in Module 1.5 – Thinking about Text and Technology (UBC, n.d.), since the days of the printing press (and perhaps even earlier), people were inclined to think of anything ‘published’ as absolute: “As an authoritative entity, text is often thought of as fixed or immutable— something we can interpret but not change.” Growing up, I never considered questioning the information I found in my textbooks. But this perspective has undoubtedly shifted with the onslaught of info, the “tsunami of data” (Wurman, 1996) in the digital era, and the multiplicity of fragmented voices on the Internet and social media. 

In this context, it isn’t easy to imagine an endeavour like the Golden Record occurring today in the same manner as in 1972. “Conflicts over texts are often proxies for wider questions of power relations. They involve what people hold most dear ” (Apple, 1992) and as Apple stated, “All too often, “legitimate” knowledge does not include the historical experiences and cultural expressions of labor, women, people of color, and others who have been less powerful” (1992). These statements were made about text and knowledge as cultural artifacts, and so I feel they are apt for the Golden Record too, “a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials,” according to the official NASA Voyager website (Voyager – The Golden Record. (n.d.). However, whose world story is being told depends on who the storyteller is – “particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge. They embody what Raymond Williams called selective tradition—someone’s selection, someone’s vision of legitimate knowledge and culture, one that in the process of enfranchising one group’s cultural capital disenfranchises another’s” (Apple, 1992).

A more appropriate approach would certainly be the one promoted by Dr. Smith Rumsey (Brown University, 2017) in the example of Carter Woodson, where representation is determined from within a culture or community in ways they deem fit and fair.

Reflecting on the network data for this exercise, they provided a visualization of results but not the reasoning behind them. Therefore, I had to go back and read individual posts to determine why some tracks were more popular than others in this particular group. However, based on my personal process of track selection, I feel that even the posts do not tell the entire story. A plethora of events, experiences, emotions, perceptions and beliefs dictate our choices and their variations, and we can only claim these as our own biased and limited responses to our specific situations.

References:

Apple, M. W. (1992). The text and cultural politics. Educational Researcher, 21(7), 4-19.

Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?” [Video]. YouTube. 

The University of British Columbia. (n.d.). [1.5] Thinking about Text and Technology. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/107180/pages/1-dot-5-thinking-about-text-and-technology?module_item_id=5148817

Voyager – The Golden Record. (n.d.). https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

Wurman, R. S. (1996). Information architects. Graphis.

Image Credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/#event-the-first-science-meeting

 

 

 

My selection of 10:

1. Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
2. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
3. Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
4. Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
5. Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
6. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
7. Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
8. Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
9. China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
10. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

This was a challenge; deciding what ‘we can afford to lose’ is a daunting task!

I tried to take a geographical approach to selection and cover major continents, as well as trying to temper this with a wider diversity of culture. I also leaned more towards selecting tracks that were less word or language-based and more instrumental. I was super-aware of my own biases during the selection process and this was in no way an ‘objective’ exercise with a definite preference for more tribal or ‘raw’ sounds over the more ‘classical’ ones.

This exercise was engaging with an unexpected process and surprising results/discoveries. Since the task emphasized an audio format, I did a simple line trace of my original image and chose to rethink my handbag objects in a more aural context. In some instances, without meaning to, this led me to a more personal and visceral expression of an idea and Postman’s notion of new technologies changing “the character of our symbols: the things we think with” (2011) resonated powerfully. Compared to the initial execution of this task, this version is messier, more intimate, abstract/confusing and less guarded. Much of this I would attribute to the change from purely writing to aural/multimodal.

After reading the New London Group’s manifesto and the idea that literacy pedagogy must now “account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies” (pg. 61, 1996), I was encouraged to explore parts of the task in my native language, something I have never done before. The medium of education and instruction has always been English throughout my life, so my innate (and unchallenged) assumption is that anything academic must be in English. Switching from writing to other modes opened up endless possibilities for exploring alternative expressions of my ideas – such as the sound of traffic. A simple idea with different representations depending on where in the world you are or which ‘lifeworld’ (The New London Group, pg. 70, 1996) you occupy.

Another example: when trying to depict the mouth freshener from ‘a taste of home,’ I did look up the Blue Ribbon jingle but found it too cheesy and commercial. It did not tally up with my feelings for this unique cultural item. So instead, I cut a short audio clip from an interesting YouTube video of a Pakistani man living in New York who ‘unboxes’ this quintessential Pakistani flavour and unexpectedly finds fifty Pakistani rupees inside. This would be worth about 19 cents in American currency, but his joy at the discovery is priceless.

This sound clip notably allowed me to think about identity and online presence at a metacognitive level, especially the idea that “meaning-makers remake themselves. They reconstruct and renegotiate their identities” (New London Group, pg. 76, 1996). Here is an elderly Pakistani man living in New York, with his own (popular) YouTube Channel, having difficulty reading English, ‘unboxing’ a distinctively Pakistani product that he seems utterly unfamiliar with. Added to this is the ‘intertextuality’ between my reading of this cultural artifact and his, which “draws attention to the increasingly complex ways in which meanings are constituted through relationships to other texts.. narratives, and other modes of meaning” (New London Group, pg. 82, 1996).

The new artifact still speaks my stories but in a different language than before, one which is perhaps less universal and more particular to me.

 

References:

Postman, N. (2011). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. (Original work published 1992)

Sabir New York. (2021, February 13). Pakistan pan masala | Pakistani gift | blue robbin pan masala [Video file]. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vja83KLQXZs

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.