To Hold Tech Accountable, Look to Public Health
How is it that public health has delivered on its promise to improve the lives of millions, while failing to resolve the dramatic health disparities of people of color in…
You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Resist the Bots
There once was a virtual assistant named Ms. Dewey, a comely librarian played by Janina Gavankar who assisted you with your inquiries on Microsoft’s first attempt at a search engine.…
An AI Told Me I Had Cancer
I realized that I had imagined the AI would take in my entire chart and make a diagnosis, possibly with some dramatic gradually-appearing images like the scenes on Grey’s Anatomy…
Platforms Can Optimize for Metrics Beyond Engagement
Social media, news, music, shopping, and other sites all rely on recommender systems: algorithms that personalize what each individual user sees. These systems are largely driven by predictions of what…
I Asked an Algorithm to Optimize My Life. Here’s What Happened
With a cutoff of five, I would be choosing a random option for about one in every 20 decisions I made with my algorithm. I picked five as the cutoff…
An AO3 Algorithm Would be Horrible, Actually
Long gone are the days when fan fiction was treated as a guilty pleasure, exclusively consumed on a glowing iPad screen under the covers at night and never to be…
Dating Apps Have a Filter Bubble Problem
It only took three days of swiping before he popped up. I froze, thumb hovering over the X. I scrolled through his photos and prompts, looking at what he had…
Health Care Bias Is Dangerous. But So Are ‘Fairness’ Algorithms
In fact, what we have described here is actually a best case scenario, in which it is possible to enforce fairness by making simple changes that affect performance for each…
The Age of AI Hacking Is Closer Than You Think
And finally—sophistication: AI-assisted hacks open the door to complex strategies beyond those that can be devised by the unaided human mind. The sophisticated statistical analyses of AIs can reveal relationships…
‘Menswear Guy’ Marks a Shift in Twitter’s Main Characters
“I don’t want to bother people,” says Derek Guy, the menswear writer from California behind the @dieworkwear Twitter account, which in recent weeks has been inescapable for a large proportion…