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There's a lot of truth in this essay but there are also a lot of unsubstantiated claims made by two people who clearly don't actually know how the Echo and Alex
by Analog24 8y ago
There's a lot of truth in this essay but there are also a lot of unsubstantiated claims made by two people who clearly don't actually know how the Echo and Alexa are developed. The tone and language implies they know what they're talking about and express everything as fact even though they're completely wrong about some of it. The sensationalism and vilifying really detract from an otherwise important topic that should be discussed more: the environmental impact of modern technology and how sustainable it is.
- elvinyung 8y agoJust curious, what parts made you think that? Kate Crawford is a very well-respected researcher on the sociological and cultural aspects of "big data". Her perspective might not be purely technical, but her descriptions of these productive processes seem very in line with a lot of the other conceptualizations (mostly in the humanities) of data as labor, which I think is the most important part.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- elvinyung 8y agoSo Crawford doesn't actually ever assert that MTurk is used directly for Alexa, only that it's one common form of commoditized data labor, of which the internal teams of annotators is actually another good example. The language thing is even more interesting. If you read Crawford's research, her whole thing is about how machine learning is full of bias, for example about how AmazonFresh availability maps resemble 1930s segregation maps. Yes, it gets kind of philosophical on the discussion, and I'm nowhere near qualified enough to get into a discussion about this, but the thing that I'm curious is, how much does the data reflect the biases of those language engineers?