Big Data and Malice

By Siddharth Singh, 5th October 2015

Previously, we read Adam Ozimek’s argument on how big data will help reveal the extent of negative externalities (costs) from our behaviour, thereby making us “more free”. This, of course, is only one aspect of big data. An interesting point emerges from the Institute of Ethics & Emerging Technologies (IEET) in the context of the Volkswagen affair: the increasing presence of software and sensors in objects to foster data collection can also be used to cheat far more effectively. The author, Marcelo Rinesi, writes on IEET:

Volkswagen didn’t make a faulty car: they programmed it to cheat intelligently. The difference isn’t semantics, it’s game-theoretical (and it borders on applied demonology). (…) Objects fail, and sometimes behave unpredictably, but they aren’t strategic, they don’t choose their behavior dynamically in order to fool you. Matter isn’t evil.

But that was before. Things now have software in them, and software encodes game-theoretical strategies as well as it encodes any other form of applied mathematics, and the temptation to teach products to lie strategically will be as impossible to resist for companies in the near future as it has been to VW, steep as their punishment seems to be.

The argument is not merely that companies will be able to cheat more effectively, but that cheating may be used strategically, keeping in mind fines and compensation that they may have to pay if they are caught.

Siddharth is on Twitter @siddharth3