Doctorow is a smart guy, which is why the weasel words he uses seems disingenuous. For example "machine learning is fundamentally conservative, and it hates change".
There's plenty of people arguing that logic itself is white oppression mechanism so I'm not surprised.
This is a moral / philosophical problem not technological one.
We have lots of things opposing each other:
- democracy and majority vote vs minorities
- solving 80% of problems efficiently vs ideal utopia
The world itself is biased, we are all biased, we all have different moral values. There is no definitive moral rule with which we could compare anything and easily say it's good or bad.
Conservatism isn't inherently bad just like openness to new ideas isn't. We usually need the right proportion of both to go forward.
So? He is still attaching emotional value to a technology. You could say the same thing with "machine learning doesn't handle change robustly". Same meaning, different emotion.
Math isn't technology, and like you said yourself, AI is just math. Attaching emotional value to math is done incredibly frequently for all sorts of reasons.
Attaching emotional value to technology is also fine. "Machine learning is fundamentally conservative" gets the point across better than "machine learning doesn't handle change robustly," which is vague and doesn't give a person looking for something to read any reason why that would matter.
> Attaching emotional value to math is done incredibly frequently for all sorts of reasons.
Writing alarmist articles for clicks being one of those reasons.
> Attaching emotional value to technology is also fine.
Why??? Doing this with other things would be ridiculous. For example, instead of "The poor are disproportionately affected by climate change" a journalist could write "The climate hates the poor". Which subtly plays down the human cause in all of this.
> "Machine learning is fundamentally conservative" gets the point across better
It demonstrably doesn't. If you just read this thread, you'll find enough people discussing whether "conservative" has a political meaning or just a "deviation from the norm" meaning.
"doesn't handle change robustly" is a good point. Doctorow doesn't just lack a good headline, he fails to really make this point. Data bias and the context-free nature of text auto-suggest are worth discussing, though.
Totally agree with you here, I knew the comment I agreed with would be buried down here.
a good TL;DR; of this article would be:
Computers are not yet sentient life forms capable of understanding the real wants and needs of human beings. Current day recommender systems, and predictive text systems are just very souped up statistics, that don't really have a lot of context or understanding of the world and their role in it.
Mate, it doesn't hate anything. It's math.