Data and AI Democracy

Do social media threaten democracy? – Scandal, outrage and politics

The Economist

It’s interesting to read this Economist editorial alongside Zeynep Tufekci’s TED talk. It focuses on the polarisation of political discourse driven by the persuasion architecture Tufekci describes, resulting in the politics of contempt. The argument is interesting, but perhaps doubly so when the Economist, which is not know for its histrionic rhetoric, concludes that ‘the stakes for liberal democracy could hardly be higher.’

That has implications well beyond politics and persuasion and supports the wider conclusion that algorithmic decision making needs to be understood, not just assumed to be neutral.

Data and AI Democracy

We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads

Zeynep Tufekci – TED

This TED talk is a little slow to get going, but increasingly catches fire. The power of algorithmically driven media may start with the crude presentation of adverts for the thing we have already just bought, but the same powers of tracking and micro-segmentation create the potential for social and political manipulation. Advertising-based social media platforms are based on persuasion architectures, and those architectures make no distinction between persuasion to buy and persuasion to vote.

That analysis leads – among other things – to a very different perception of the central risk of artificial intelligence: it is not that technology will develop a will of its own, but that it will embody, almost undetectably, the will of those in a position to use it. The technology itself may, in some senses, be neutral; the business models it supports may well not be.

Organisational change

Digital Disruption Is a People Problem

Gerald Kane – MIT Sloan Management Review

The idea of digital disruption is familiar enough. Usually that’s seen as a consequence of rapid technological change. Clearly that’s part of the story, but this post argues that the more important challenge is not so much adopting the technology as adapting the people and organisations which use it – and that that is messier and harder to do well. It follows that to be successful digitally, organisations need to be effective at managing organisational change.