Is Data Science Evil?
By: Moral Robots
Tags: Social Responsibility, Technology, Data Science, Ethics, Artificial Intelligence

The evils of data science and AI

We’ve come a long way since the 70s, and computers today don’t rape or mutilate people wearing black face masks. (Although, with the virus, we’ve all become a little more Darth-Vader-like). Instead, they enable the transition to a cashless economy, from which the poorest in society will be excluded (one cannot drop a credit card into a beggar’s hat, and neither would anyone like to have their card swiped by a card reader on the street). AI systems assist judges in estimating the risk posed to society by particular offenders and decide on sentences or bail based on algorithms that are kept hidden from view.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

AI is at the forefront of environmental destruction, not only through the use of vast amounts of energy and carbon emissions for training computationally intensive models, but also by supporting research that will open up the Arctic to commercial exploitation, by enabling fossil-fuel companies to find new sources of oil, and by being one of the industries with the shortest time-to-obsolescence of its products. AI algorithms allow us to create new, terrifying weapons, come up with new types of terrorism, manipulate democratic processes, and endanger jobs on a global scale.

Via the cultural imperialism of the US and its ubiquitous language, “US English (international)” (as my keyboard settings call it), AI-supported toys for children, based on Disney characters, have replaced traditional cultural content in many societies.

Google translate supports only 109 languages out of an estimated 6500 that are in existence.

None of the big AI products in use today support cultures and value systems other than vaguely Christian-based, Western ones. There are no Islamic rules of censorship in Facebook, but there is the North-American-minded censorship of women’s breasts. There are no Hindu restrictions on talking about cow’s meat on Twitter, but there is censorship of anti-vaxxers and global climate emergency deniers.

Not that I am in favour of either of these dangerous and criminal groups. The point here is not to defend human stupidity, but to point out how our AI-controlled and enforced rules of public discourse have a severe cultural bias. Think of censoring the images of cows being slaughtered, or a restaurant ad showing a juicy steak. Yet, for hundreds of millions of people, such an image is as revolting, or more, than what we censor in our Western media when it touches our own sensibilities.

Photo by bill wegener on Unsplash

And lastly, to not let the list get too long (although it probably already is), AI causes an immense concentration of power in the hands of very few big companies that have ownership of the vast amounts of data needed to train effective models: Google, Baidu, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Tesla. Small companies, startups, a possible Shia-Islamic search engine, a Kazakh self-driving car, a culturally-aware South Pacific Islands social network — these are and will remain utopias, because their respective population bases are not big enough to make training AI models for them worthwhile, or even possible.