Technically Wrong?

Reading Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher offered a space to understand and reflect on what I might be neglecting when working on my thesis.

As I opened and closed and opened and closed the book, I continuously referred back to the title and wondered if these biased products are technically wrong, or perhaps, are just wrong? Does it help to blame products or should we blame the creators, the way of building that has become the norm?
There are now more and more discussions around ethics or robots but is it really about robots? Or are we simply avoiding the core problem where robots themselves aren’t unethical, they will only inherit the biases that we have. Joi Ito the director of Media Lab recently wrote a manifesto on resisting reduction and hence singularity, and encouraged people to shift their perception of artificial intelligence toward extended intelligence.

The process of reading this book has led to many conversations around what I can offer now, as an alternative way of building. With my investigation, part of the problem that surfaced was that products are often produced with a very focused and hence narrow scope. If there’s a reminder or a motivation to apply an aperture or a lens to the scope, perhaps the product can then be examined at various scale. This thinking has led to me iterating on different continuums to understand the scale at which we currently develop products at, versus the scale that we should be developing the products at.

More to come..