Skip to content

AI and avoiding digital phrenology

Giving AI too much credit is a big issue that needs to be considered in the mix of how we improve the ethical structures around its use. If it isn’t as good as we’re told it is, why is it allowed to play such a big role in parts of our lives?

Seamus Byrne
Seamus Byrne
3 min read
AI and avoiding digital phrenology

Kate Crawford is a very excellent Australian academic and researcher in the world of technology and AI. It’s been a few years since I first spotted her use of the phrase “digital phrenology” but the idea really struck me again with her latest piece in Nature.

AI is generating reports, insights and guidance that is given the assumed air of Truth greater than we mere humans could have come up with… but how often is that just reading the tea leaves with no real foundation beyond some assumptions attached to an algorithm?

We dig into these questions a lot when it comes to matters of bias. Race, gender, education, postcode. But what about wider questions of ‘sentiment tracking’ and ‘productivity assessment’?

Even our belief that AI is now so good at predicting our desires that it shows us the perfect ad at the right moment. I’ve often struggled to argue against that idea myself because sometimes it feels so uncanny, but like noticing the clock at 11:21 (hi X-Files nerds) or 13:37 (hi gamer friends) we need to consider all those other ads we scrolled past that we didn’t notice because they weren’t so ‘perfect’.

Giving AI too much credit is a big issue that needs to be considered in the mix of how we improve the ethical structures around its use. If it isn’t as good as we’re told it is, why is it allowed to play such a big role in parts of our lives?

The EU is considering a draft proposal that looks at banning algorithms and AI from many areas of our social lives. But experts question the vague and loose definitions – if you’re going to pass big laws, you need to get them right. It’s hard to come back to them again a second time to fix the mistakes.

But hey, they have a draft. They’re considering how to rein in what’s already impacting deeply on our lives in an entirely unregulated fashion.

We need to stop thinking that the data holds all the secrets to our inner workings. Digital bumps on the skull are not where the truth lies.

It’s wildly dangerous to let businesses and governments make massive decisions on how the world works because an algorithm told them so.

Must Read

Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions

The pandemic is being used as a pretext to push unproven artificial-intelligence tools into workplaces and schools.

www.nature.com  •  Share

Alex Berenson: The Pandemic's Wrongest Man

Often it’s best to ignore people who are shouting lies into the world. Other times it’s very good to eviscerate them in long form.

www.theatlantic.com  •  Share

Strong Bad Emails and Homestar Runner videos will always be funny

The Flash animation series from the early 2000s, revived by the Brothers Chaps (aka Matt Chapman and Mike Chapman) started in the George W. Bush era and endured through the takeover of the internet by Facebook and Twitter. But the online comedy was simple, and may never spoil.

www.polygon.com  •  Share

Byteside Podcasts

Don’t forget to follow Bits in your favourite podcasting app now! Eight headlines a day in less than five minutes. Loads of tech with a sprinkle of science, games and culture stories in the mix.

Get it: Acast | Spotify | Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Overcast

Big News

Australia’s Finally Going To Get An Electric Car That’ll Apparently Cost Well Below $35K

Chinese car manufacturer BYD is set to bring release the cheapest electric car ever sold in Australia & here’s what we know so far.

www.gizmodo.com.au  •  Share

Ireland to replace last coal plant with huge green hub and floating wind farm

Ireland to replace its last remaining coal generation with a huge 1.4GW floating wind farm, and create a new clean energy and green hydrogen hub.

reneweconomy.com.au  •  Share

Interesting

'What Drives Us', a documentary about rock bands whose earliest tours were made by van

What Drives Us is a feature length documentary about rock bands that started out touring by van, directed by Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters.

laughingsquid.com  •  Share

Watch a master Japanese printmaker at work: unintentional relaxing ASMR

Today we can appreciate Japanese woodblock prints from sizable online archives whenever we like, and even download them for ourselves. Before the internet, how many chances would we have had even to encounter such works of art in the course of life?

www.openculture.com  •  Share

AIPolitics

Seamus Byrne Twitter

Founder and Head of Content at Byteside.


Related Posts

Nightshade: poisoning AI image models

Meet Nightshade. A tool for collective, offensive artist action against image scraping for AI. Nightshade adds a human-eye invisible interference pattern to images that will accumulate to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data".

Great summer reads

16 great links to some of the best stories around the web that help you stay on top of what's next in digital.

Cartoon style robot at a table looking at a typewriter.

What will the Canva of AI copy mean for writing?

Every industry has its practitioners who over charge and under deliver. Both graphic design and copywriting have more than their fair share.

A robot sits in the foreground, typing on a weird typewriter. There are rows of more robots, all typing.