11 月 reading

p165

IBM and the Holocaust: data lust

confronted with demands for privacy protection, China's leaders took a novel approach. They co-opted and refined the very notion of privacy: no longer an abstract individual right, instead it was  now welded to the collective concept of national security, and in turn to the security of the Party itself.

P188

Algorithmic systems use math to build abstract models of the world to predict hypothetical outcomes. They draw on the ideas about information and control that Norbert Wiener developed in Cybernetics and that Qian xuesen took back with him to China. Algorithms try to predict an outcome by digesting  past data about the world they are meant to describe, the same way that the human brain creates models of the world based on past information and experience. Because humans design algorithms and choose which training data to feed them, they are never perfect.

p262

Whatever approach democracies choose, they will ultimately need to start with transparency. Digital surveillance prefers to work out of sight, in the shadows. Minimizing its harms means dragging it into the light.