Let me give you a specific example. I once had a conversation with a carpenter where he talked about the nature of the trade in this day and age. He mentioned to me that a local home builder (I won't name names) expected his framers to work so fast that they were forbidden to "crown" the floor joists in the houses they were banging together. The following YouTube video explains what this means, but basically is a very easy-to-do step in building a home that objectively makes the final finished home better to live in.
Why would a home builder do such a thing? It isn't just greed, although that probably has something to do with it. There are other considerations. The more man-hours it takes to build a house, the more it costs. And people buying homes often don't really know much about construction so they rely upon the square footage of floor space to define how "good" a house is.
I realized this fact when I worked as a chimney sweep, many years ago. A lot of that job entailed doing jobs for people with money---lots of money. I climbed onto the roofs of many a "McMansion" and quite a few real ones too. They were huge, but they were often very shoddily built. You notice this when you go into the basement to check on the base of the flue or walk around the building to place your ladders.
I realized this fact when I worked as a chimney sweep, many years ago. A lot of that job entailed doing jobs for people with money---lots of money. I climbed onto the roofs of many a "McMansion" and quite a few real ones too. They were huge, but they were often very shoddily built. You notice this when you go into the basement to check on the base of the flue or walk around the building to place your ladders.
They also often had the most ridiculous furnishings. Beautiful, custom-made bookshelves filled with Reader's Digest condensed books (the book spines all look nice); Bang & Olufsen stereos with albums by Slim Whitman on the turntable. (I learned that money doesn't buy taste.)
If you don't know anything about home construction and you have never developed any sort of aesthetic sense, then the only thing you can really do is buy the biggest house and fill it with the most expensive furnishings that you can afford. A developer is just like any other business person, he has to create product that customers want, not what he thinks that they should. Hence the McMansion.
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I'm not writing this post to talk about housing. (I've certainly flogged that horse long enough!) I'm just using it as a concrete example of something that's happening all through our society. On one level, it's the triumph of quantity over quality, or, of number over just about everything else.
Most of this is invisible to ordinary people, but you often hear rumblings about what's going on. Recently, for example, I heard a podcast on the CBC where someone explained why Google offers us gmail for free. It turns out that they have developed software that reads our email and that allows it to develop a personal profile of each of us. And this is what has allowed Google to personalize advertising to our particular personal interests and preferences. Indeed, most of the "Google Suite" (ie: Google Calendar, Maps, News, etc) harvests information from our daily life. This isn't to say that there are actual human beings doing any of this, but rather that an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program is creating increasingly detailed files on each of us. In practice this means that when we send an email to Aunt Martha saying that the wife had a baby Google can read the email and send us an ad for a diaper service.
A lot of people get "the creeps" over this, but I'm more sanguine about it than most. That's because I grew up in a very old-fashioned part of the country, and privacy there was almost non-existent. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing almost instantly. Most folks don't realize this, but privacy has pretty much only existed in the city---and there it was generally only a part of a very few people's life. The poor lived cheek bye jowl with lots of others and the wealthy were always on display to their servants. The results could be awful for people with something to hide (religious dissenters, gays, people at odds with authoritarian governments, etc), but that's simply been the way it was for most of human history. If you are afraid of the neighbours (or Google, FaceBook, et al) ratting you out to the Inquisition or the Secret Police, you have to "take measures" to protect yourself.
What I'm concerned about in this editorial is the situation I raised in the example of naive people buying very large and expensive---yet none-the-less shoddily built---houses. That is to say, we can do all sorts of useful things with numbers, but it is tremendously important that we collect and use the right ones instead of the wrong ones.
And it's important to understand that the numbers that are being created by the AIs that businesses like Google, FaceBook, Amazon, etc, use have been created in secret and are not being disclosed to the citizenry. That means that our society is increasingly being built around decisions that are not only not obvious in their implication, but that ordinary citizens---or even appointed officials---aren't being allowed to access. Increasingly, some of the key elements of our society are being built in proprietary "black boxes".
If you wonder what I'm talking about, I heard a podcast recently where the host asked a simple question. "If FaceBook's AI can't effectively keep fake news and white nationalists off FaceBook, how come I've never seen any pornography or appeals to join ISIS on it? What's the difference?" The implication is that there is something about the hidden, internal decision-making culture of the business that has been "baked into" the software; and it's never been a big enough priority for the executives to get this problem fixed.
I would suggest that it's about time that our government got interested in fixing the problems that come from bad data analysis. We have regulations to stop butchers from selling tainted meat. We have regulations to stop selling appliances that can electrocute you too. Why can't we have regulations to stop on-line businesses from creating shoddily-built algorithms that spread fake news and hate?
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