Bias in Technology

The axiomatic error is to believe that bias is something that can be isolated, abstracted, excoriated and fixed. The kernel function of logical system self-containment that compels the indefinitely-extensible combinatorial depth of communications (as information-encoding and processing) systems is grounded very much less upon certainty and teleological closure.

Bias is in one way or another and quite plausibly an irreducible variable in all technological futures. What I think we do mistake at something of an axiomatic level is that this endemic disconnect and all corollary equitable and ethical discontinuity is not a foundational error in the form and function of information processing systems but quite counter-intuitively constitutes a kernel function of their optimal self-propagation.

Systems of information and energy-processing (also – encoding, storage, memory, history, speciation) maximally self-propagate as a function of their failures, of errors in replication, of semantic ambiguity and of the hyper-inflating logical depth that shifting cognitive and technical dialects invoke.

No surprise, perhaps, when entropy is globally-distributed that all successful or at least sustainably continuous computational artefacts, entities and systems persist as much as a function of the implicit, intractable and irredeemable drift through dissipation and error as they do as a property of convergence and growth.

Negotiating bias will prove impossible if we do not admit into discussion the possibility that an orientation towards teleological closure is anything other than a core deception by which ethical language and all related institutional induction itself optimally reproduce themselves.

In this view – history proceeds and technological civilisational evolves as a function of its failures; language self-replicates precisely as a function of its failure to unambiguously, consistently or reliably communicate; truth reproduces itself maximally as a consequence of the invocation of its inverse. No surprise, then, that so many are content at time to engage in participatory totalitarianism – the logic of cognition, if language and of life itself predisposes them towards their own worst choices.