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Like bureaucracy, AI’s algorithms are a way of organising large systems where abstractions create a wall between a system and those it is applied to, so that the latter are reduced to a collection of disparate labels and categories. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the synergy of state institutions and algorithms has already shown a tendency to scale structural violence.
AI Will Create a Thousand Post Office Scandals
Dan McQuillan
One of the reasons people get excited about AI is because of the way it can be applied to so many different challenges. However, the characteristics of abstraction and optimization that make AI so appealing also make it brittle in ways that amount to statistical callousness. Its operations easily become forms of social profiling and targeting that act as ‘solutionism’, that is, as technical fixes that cover up underlying structural unfairness.
Resisting AI
Dan McQuillan
Transcription/Translation. The fourth type is the automatic translation of information from one format to another: automatic transcription (sometimes called “automatic speech recognition” or “speech to text”), finding words and characters in images (like automatically reading license plates), machine translation of one language to another, or something like image style transfer (taking a selfie and making it look like an anime character).
The AI Con
Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
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