Quick shoutout to “Code Dependent” by Madhumita Murgia. I stumbled upon it at Waterstones the other day and purchased it on a whim. So glad I did as it was a very enjoyable read.
I was half expecting (and not looking forward to) it being a book that bashes AI (or goes the other way and gushes over it). Instead, this book was very neutral. It went into a lot of AI usage (gig economy, data labelling, profiling people, video surveillance etc.) and had a very balanced view of things. Yes, AI is being used for a lot of harm, but it is also used in some good ways. I liked that.
To me AI is a symptom of the overall issue. I think over time our social structures and institutions have been failing – not due to immigation or people etc. but more due to lack of investment in them. Things might have been easier in the past for the rich countries at least due to colonialism and such when money was flowing around, but for a long time that hasn’t been the case and all countries have had to invest from whatever money they have via trade and other means. And this doesn’t always happen, and so over time the quality of things has gone done. Be it from simple things like replacing the person at the other end of the phone when you call your bank or shop – first with cheap workers in call centres in India etc. and later with AI – to bigger things like lack of proper healthcare facilities, doctors etc.
So in all of these cases we look to see how we can get away with the bare minimum. We try and remove the human element from it by trying to codify what is happening – break a task down to a series of steps (algorithms) – and then either hand that off to whoever can do it cheaply, or now AI. But the fundamental issue is that we are trying to convert an analog things (humans and the things they do) into something digital or discrete (a bunch of steps, a policy, an algorithm) because that’s all we can do to try and reduce costs instead of investing more. Try and capture what the essence of what a human is trying to do, then given it to some other human who can do it cheaply (either in a different country or somoene cheaper in country). And then the logical conclusion of this trend is to completely remove the human from the equation and replace them with an AI, because that’s all we are focussing on now – the steps, and how we can save costs.
This is why the world just feels shitty nowadays, I think. There’s less and less of a human touch/ interaction. Even when you get to talk to a human on the other end of a customer support call or shop etc., they have less autonomy because they have a script they must follow. They can’t make decisions because that’s what they have been told. And if you push back, you are just told that that’s the policy.
And this feeling is what Madhumita manages to convey in Code Dependent, though maybe not so explicitly. (These ideas have been going around in my head for a bit coz of all the non-fiction reading I do, especially “Survival of the Richest” recently which had similar themes, so my overall feeling of the book was also coloured with this).
A good read, highly recommended!