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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I don't see this improving a whole hell of a lot anytime soon. The shift toward hiring/renting/giving credit based on surface information is only increasing. Big data is going to bifurcate us unfairly and arbitrarily more than we were ever able to on our own in the past.
I think lawsuits over discrimination-by-algorithm are going to become more frequent and much larger in the next few decades.
Jumping off a bit, management and governance from the "helicopter view" are going to make a shit show of society, and I don't see any hope of us stopping it. There's a delusion being bought by almost all people with power that huge organizations, markets, and even countries can be fully understood and managed by viewing mere data about how they operate in aggregate.*
This thinking isn't irrational, of course, but we don't have to look far to see its Achilles Heel - the 2008 Crash. The aggregate data never provide a complete picture of what's going on at the street level. God only knows how much damage and unknown risk we'll cause by applying such know-it-all-ism and total reliance on necessarily blunt data in realms beyond finance and insurance.
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*Wall Street would tell us otherwise, but their broad analyses only appear accurate because its all the same self-reinforcing data passed back and forth between and among the same limited actors, upon which those actors engage in herd investing, the timing of which creates profits. You don't have to have accurate data to win at musical chairs.
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Huh? The whole point of the studies discussed in the article was that there were no differences attributable to "big data" or "algorithm," but only differences in race (based on skin color or names).
