Day: 16 September 2018
Fading out the Echo of Consumer Protection: An empirical study at the intersection of data protection and trade secrets
This is by way of a footnote to the previous post – a bit more detail on one small part of the enormous ecosystem described there.
If you buy an Amazon Echo then, partly depending on what you intend to do with it, you may be required to accept 17 different contracts, amounting to close to 50,000 words, not very far short of the length of a novel. You will also be deemed to be monitoring them all for any changes, and to have accepted any such changes by default.
That may be extreme in length and complexity, but the basic approach has become normal to the point of invisibility. That raises a question about the reasonableness of Amazon’s approach. But it raises a much more important question about our wider approach to merging new technologies into existing social, cultural and legal constructs. This suggests, to put it mildly, that there is room for improvement.
(note that the link is to a conference agenda page rather than directly to the presentation, as that is a 100Mb download, but if needed this is the direct link)
Anatomy of an AI System
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
An Amazon Echo is a simple device. You ask it do things, and it does them. Or at least it does something which quite a lot of the time bears some relation to the thing you ask it do. But of course in order to be that simple, it has to be massively complicated. This essay, accompanied by an amazing diagram (or perhaps better to say this diagram, accompanied by an explanatory essay), is hard to describe and impossible to summarise. It’s a map of the context and antecedents which make the Echo possible, covering everything from rare earth geology to the ethics of gathering training data.
It’s a story told in a way which underlines how much seemingly inexorable technology in fact depends on social choices and assumptions, where invisibility should not be confused with inevitability. In some important ways, though, invisibility is central to the business model – one aspect of which is illustrated in the next post.