Daunting tales of how everyday algorithms are changing us
What’s in the box? That’s the question almost everyone that Madhumita Murgia speaks to seems to be asking. If the “black box” of the algorithm is going to make critical decisions about our health, education or human rights, it would be nice to know exactly what it contains. So long as it remains a mystery, what can you do if you find your child added to a list of potential future criminals based on flawed, even racist, data, as happened to hundreds of families in the Netherlands in the late 2010s?
It’s these Kafkaesque absurdities, and how they play out on a human level, that interest Murgia, the Financial Times’s first artificial intelligence editor. Code, she reminds us several times in this troubling book, is not neutral.
This isn’t a story about ChatGPT and the other large language models and their looming impact on everything from Hollywood to homework, though there is a bit of that. Instead, it’s an account of how the everyday algorithms we have already learned to live beside are changing us: from the people paid (not much) to make sense of vast datasets, to the unintended consequences of the biases they contain. It’s also the story of how the AI systems built using that data benefit many of us (you, ordering McDonald’s on UberEats) at the expense of some – usually individuals and communities that are already marginalised (the young immigrant worker picking up your Big Mac for a small fee).
The scope of Murgia’s reporting here, reflective of her day job, is vast. She takes us from the sometimes comically basic way AI systems are trained (workers in a Kenyan office block labelling road signs to teach driverless cars to recognise them) to how its flaws play out in the finished product (the delivery drivers paid less because their app doesn’t account for delays caused by roadworks or having to cycle uphill).
