CODE DEPENDENT: LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF AI
By Madhumita Murgia
Picador, Rs 699
In November 2020, Helen Mort had a surprise ruder than the pandemic. An acquaintance informed her that while browsing a pornographic site, he had come across Helen’s photographs as a victim of gang-rape. Later, she and her husband figured out that photos scraped from her defunct Facebook account (and her private Instagram account) had been digitally manipulated.
Madhumita Murgia’s book has the power to spook you before bedtime. Most of our anxieties about technology have long been seen in the context of how capitalism can use it against us. Throw in the worry about the State controlling that technology and the anxiousness of predictive policing and one can arrive at an important query: who will these AI algorithms serve?
The technology writer for the Financial Times has spent considerable time understanding how Artificial Intelligence stirs the highest ambitions of Silicon Valley and beyond, but her book focuses on its impact on ordinary people in a language that’s lucid. Yet, the explanations and stories are not overly simplistic to annoy tech book readers.
Murgia is asking readers to picture AI- and algorithm-driven systems that make important decisions with massive impacts on our lives. These are systems that are complex and opaque while the lives that are being impacted do not know the kind of data that have been gathered about them and how they are being compared with other datasets. Nobody knows the degree of bias. It’s a bit like Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, which opens with the unexplained arrest of Josef K., who doesn’t know what the evidence against him is and nobody is willing to offer him an account of how the system works.
Code Dependent captures brave stories, like that of Maya Wang who has fears “about the digital dragnet of surveillance in mainland China, and the rights of citizens in the region”, and how Wang perceives the Integrated Joint Operations Platform to be “the back end of Xinjiang’s surveillance state”. The journalist in Murgia shines through when readers are taken down Mombasa Road in Kenya to Sama’s facility, which comes with the tagline: ‘The Soul of AI’. For OpenAI, Sama’s workers were hired to “categorise and label tens of thousands of toxic and graphic text snippets — including descriptions of child sexual abuse, murder, suicide and incest.” It is their work that allows ChatGPT to recognise and filter certain queries.
The action quickly moves to “impoverished women” in Calcutta’s Metiabruz labelling “voice clips for Amazon’s Echo speaker”. One can argue that such work alleviates the financial difficulties of many subcontracted AI labourers but the wealth that is created is not being shared conscientiously. At times, workers need to sign non-disclosure agreements to acknowledge that their work might cause PTSD after looking at disturbing images.
Murgia, who doesn’t forget to capture how AI can also help “flawed humans live our best and happiest lives”, reminds us that “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence” is actually the new voice of capitalism and bureaucracy.