American democracy was founded on lofty ideals of representation, balance of powers, and the rule of law, yet from the beginning it carried deep inequities. Slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the exclusion of women and the poor from genuine participation revealed that justice was never evenly shared. Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, saw […]
The problematic persistence of algorithmic bias is a mystery to me. Not, as it happens, because I am particularly baffled or confronted by this form of technological encoding and mediated emergence of core social and cultural inaccuracies, assumptions and deep-seated human insecurities. It is much simpler than that, in the end. Machine-intelligence powered classificatory systems […]
Nothing quite extinguishes any mythology of accomplishment and pride in the achievements and sophistication of human civilisation than seeing an utterly isolated homeless person sleeping on a ramshackle mattress and amid their few ignominiously-bagged worldly belongings while early morning commuters rush to work around them…
Daedelus Kite 