New Doodles and Zittrain’s “Minds for Sale” part one!
November 19, 2009
I’ve added two more doodles to the Artsy Stuff > Computer Doodles section. I’ll add them here, too!
I’m also hoping to send out my write up about the really interesting talk I went to last night. Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard’s Berkman Center gave his “Minds for Sale” talk. Info here.
Long story short – I think most of the problems he expressed aren’t unique to cloud computing (or technology at all). Generally speaking, there’s a danger when people agree to do work when they don’t understand the overarching goal of the project or even who they’re working for.
Simple example: Someone puts an ad in the paper: “Will hire someone to flier cars in x shopping center.” You know that’s a heavily Persian area and so you aren’t surprised that the ads are in Farsi. You accept the job, get your $20 and continue on your merry way.
Turns out those little fliers were actually filled with hate speech, threatening to kill Muslims and Muslim supporters.
You didn’t really care (or perhaps better said, you didn’t really think to care) when you took the job what the flier said. And, especially because it was in Farsi, you didn’t have ready access to figuring it out for yourself. But, if the ad would have said “Will pay someone to distribute Muslim hate speech on cars!” you certainly would have declined.
Now taking that to the land “o” the Internets, things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allows people to post simple jobs (like, “what words best describe this picture”) for something like $.01/job. The “turks” have no idea what the larger scope of the project might be and it’s possible if they did, they’d never support it.
So the worry seems to be that things like Mechanical Turk at least have the potential to make people complicit in activities they never would have supported otherwise. But, because you’re just turning one little cog, you might be.
Food for thought…
Comments
Got something to say?