CLIVE THOMPSON
Leave The Driving
to Us
Machines can make decisions. That doesn’t
mean they’re right.
So
you can’t wait for a self-driving
car to take away the drudgery of driving? Me neither! But consider
this scenario, recently posed by neuroscientist Gary Marcus :
your car is on a narrow bridge when a school bus veers into
your lane. Should your self-driving car plunge off the bridge-sacrificing
your life t save those of the children? Obviously, you won’t
make the call. You’ve ceded that decision to the car’s algorithms.
You better hope that you agree with its choice. This
is a dramatic dilemma, to be sure. But it’s not a
completely unusual one. The truth is, our tools increasingly
guide and shape our behavior or even make decisions
on our behalf. A small but growing chorus of writers and scholars
think we’re going too far. By taking human decisionmaking
out of the equation, we’re slowly stripping away deliberation-moments
where we reflect on the morality of our actions.
Not
all of these situations are so life-and-death. Some are quite
prosaic, like the welter of new gadgets that try to “nudge” us into
better behavior. In his new book To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgency Morozov casts
a skeptical eye on this stuff. He tells me about a recent example
he’s seen : a “smart fork” that monitors how much you’re eating
and warns you if you’re overdoing it.
Fun
and useful, you might argue. But for Morozov, tools like the fork
reduce your incentive to think about how you’re eating,
and the deeper political questions of why todays food
ecosystem is so enfattening. “Instead of regulating the
food industry to make food healthier,” Morozov says, “we’re giving
people smart forks”.
Or
as Evan Selinger, a philosopher at Rochester intitute
of technology, puts it, tools that make hard thing easy can make us
less likely to tolerate things that are hard. Outsourcing our
self-control to “digital power” has consequences: use siri
constantly to get instant information and you can erode
your ability to be patient in the face of complete
answers, a crucial civic virtue.
Things
get even dicier when society at large outsources its
biggest moraldecisios to technology. For example, some police
departments have begu using PredPol, a system that mines crime
data to predict future criminal activity, guiding
police to areas they might otherwise overlook. It appears
to work, cutting some crime by up to 27 percent. It lets chronically
underfunded departments do more wvth less.
But
as Morozov points out, the algorithms could wind up amplifying
flaws in existing law enforcement. For example , sexual violence
is historically underreported, so it can’t as easily
be predicted. Remove the deliberation of what police
focus on and you can wind up deforming policing.
