Skip to main content

Looking at: "Coded Bias"

 

 A film by Shalini Kantayya.

Join our free two-week screening of the trailblazing film Coded Bias that sheds light on the threats artificial intelligence poses to civil rights and democracy

 Considering how Google abruptly fired Dr. Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders in the Ethical AI field, this is very timely. Also, very cool, she's in this documentary as well!

As of this writing, you still have a few days to watch "Coded Bias" for free over here


I don't know if it's truly similar, but using a generated password to access the movie through cinesend...this must be how members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would feel if they watched all the movies and didn't vote based upon Hollywood alliances, film unseen.

This is also a bonus review of the cinesend interface; It's plain. Video is there. The file name is in the lower right hand corner. Video quality and speed options, typical playback buttons. No caption options.

AIs are trained by the data humans give it - Those faces are often lighter, whiter, and male.

Joy Buolamwini, The young woman at MIT we're introduced to at first, did research on why her face - Darker, female - was often not recognized, even when she changed the AI software. To my surprise, IBM did better recognizing her than Microsoft or Face ++

Since there are no regulations on facial recognition in most countries, governments can use it how they want, with no thought to our personal liberties. Basically, profit > people. The modus operandi for America.

Case in point: This apartment complex installed biometrics instead of keycards in a primarily black neighborhood. Luckily, tenants are fighting back.

People build AI, and have no idea how it works?

 

Remind me why it's so difficult for me and others to get a foot in the door of this industry if all we're doing is pressing buttons and hoping for the outcome that puts the most money in our pockets.

Wrong skin color, wrong gender, outspoken, people are chosen for relatability over competency and ability to learn,wrong location...let's keep going.

Yep, they mention Facebook's Election Experiments and Amazon selling Ring footage to police departments. Also, the financial system was - surprise! - set up to profit off of people's extreme misfortune. Taking advantage of the poor.

I don't want to write about this movie line by line, because you should watch it for yourself. It opened my eyes to the insidious ways AI has snuck into our lives to make it harder to succeed. 

One more thing - They do talk about how we're all being scored in social ways. You look at the social credit system of China and go "That's horrendous," - but look at networking. 

You're expected to have a 'presence' on LinkedIn, or you're seen as untrustworthy. 

You have to do some weird insincere networking that emphasizes buzzwords ("value add", "relationship building") over honesty ("I want to work, can you help me?")

(This article says everything I want to about that platform.)

It rewards a very specific type of personality with more opportunities, connections - and people just...allow it. Not everybody fits that. Not all of us want to be best friends just to work somewhere we enjoy.

On a film standpoint, there are so many ways to make documentaries, I find them hard to judge. The information is broken down in bites, jumping between 3 people. The information comes through, and that's good enough for me.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

 If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return.   In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory