Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!
You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:
The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!
Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:
Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":
Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.
Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.
But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.
Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.
But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:
Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:
https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests
Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.
If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:
If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:
Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:
All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:
Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.
There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.
But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:
The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":
Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.
Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.
That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.
But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.
As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"
The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
“I’m a traitor, right?” said one former Teamster who became an anti-union consultant.
Dave Jamieson at HuffPost:
Joe Brock gets a lot of calls from employers in distress. The 62-year-old works as a “union avoidance” consultant, so companies come to him when their workers are on the verge of organizing. He hears from employers of all stripes who want to stay union-free — hospitals, retailers, manufacturers. But it’s no coincidence that many who want Brock specifically are squaring off with the Teamsters.
After all, Brock used to be an elected Teamsters official in Philadelphia. The son of a union leader, he served as president of Teamsters Local 830 before he lost a contentious election and was ousted from office. Since then, he has been working union campaigns from the other side. He belongs to a prolific subgroup of “persuaders” who were once part of the labor movement but now work against it as consultants-for-hire.
A self-described “unabashed liberal union buster” who still receives a Teamsters pension, Brock has been called plenty of names over the years.
“I’m a traitor, right?” he said in an interview. “I’m not ashamed of it.
There is no denying a certain turncoat aspect to the “union busting” industry, as unions derisively call it. Many persuaders come out of corporate human resources or labor relations. But union defectors can be especially attractive to employers because of their knowledge of particular unions and their experience in running workplace campaigns. Brock boasts that he knows unions “more than they know themselves.”
“That’s why former union-side people are so valued in this field,” he said. “We know campaigns, and the employees tend to believe us. The good ones don’t need to lie.”
Some of these consultants found their way to the employer side after being politically sidelined. A few turned up campaigning against unions within months or even weeks of leaving their unions. One was apparently hired away by an employer he was in the middle of organizing. Whatever the circumstances of their break with labor, their new line of work offers better financial prospects.
Employers pay Brock’s firm upwards of $3,000 per day, plus expenses, for each consultant who works on a campaign, according to Labor Department filings. Brock goes into workplaces himself as a persuader, but he can make additional money by subcontracting other consultants onto a job. A good contract can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University who has researched the labor consulting world, said former union employees probably comprise a minority of the industry. But for logical reasons, he said, the field will always attract players with union pasts.
“If it’s not an issue of principle for you, and this is your only area of expertise, you can make a good living on the other side,” he explained. “Your former background as a union official or organizer is actually a marketable thing: ‘We know where the skeletons are and how they operate.’”
[...]
A Profitable Career Change
Few persuaders have leveraged their union history as well as Brock.
Brock’s father was a truck driver at Coca-Cola and a shop steward for Teamsters Local 830 in Philadelphia who later became the union’s top officer. The young Brock soaked up his dad’s Democratic, pro-labor politics and became a Teamster in 1979, working as a Coca-Cola fleet mechanic. He rose to become president of his father’s union in 2001, and later led workers out on strike at the bottling plant.
His failed bid in 2006 for Local 830’s highest position, secretary-treasurer, led to his estrangement from the union. He would not discuss the election because it was the subject of a lawsuit and settlement, but court documents paint a feud filled with the sort of ugly internal union politics that persuaders make a point of sharing with workers.
Brock accused his political opponents of carrying out a “campaign of personal vilification and harassment,” including alleged threatening phone calls. The competing slate claimed Brock misappropriated the election voter list and misused his position as president to secure a favorable line of credit for printing campaign materials. They passed out a flyer saying Brock was found “guilty of theft” ― a reference to an internal union hearing led by his opponents, not a criminal proceeding. Brock called it libel.
He lost by 34 votes and claimed the flyer had helped sink his candidacy, according to court records. The Labor Department dismissed Brock’s claims that the Teamsters had failed to run a fair election. He testified that he was unable to find another job covered by Local 830.
HuffPost continues its excellent "The Persuaders" series, this time focusing on how a union official defected to the union-buster side.
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The goons and finks use a variety of diplomatic jargon to mask their often illegal, always antidemocratic industry. The firms participating in unionbusting take in together billions of dollars every year, mostly in the form of corporate law offices that specialize in so-called 'labor relations' or 'union avoidance', but using these law firms as middlemen or going directly to the source, the boss class contracts with a variety of other firms that employ dirty tricks and methods of intimidation to help keep union density in the United States at 9% and falling.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a brief list of firms with specializations in this field in Atlanta alone, culled from only the first page of a google search:
Kilpatrick Townsend employs eight such specialists in Atl and North Carolina.
The Weissman Group suggests employers put their dollars into consulatants' fees rather than respecting workers' dignity.
Miller & Martin PLLC offers the Tennessee based Bradford G. Harvey to get his hands dirty fighting your rights.
EpsteinBeckerGreen will send down Steven M. Swirsky all the way from the Big Apple.
GreenbergTraurig employs the local Peter N. Hall, who looks like he has about as much charm as a Scott Walker with a wedgie.
Ogletree Deakins suggests shareholder Gregory J. Hare and his Gregory J. Hairpiece.
And Duane Morris partner Terry P. Finnerty participates in every facet of 'labor relations' this side of slave trading.
To contact ELI Inc (eliinc.com) about their innovative 'union avoidance' workshop, just call 800-497-7654.
Other companies offer to import in some good old scabs for you:
MadiCorp offers 'total control' of its 'strike replacement workers.' Well, that wasn't very subtle.
Immediate Staffing Group (isgsol.com) offers the scabs, their transit and security.
And Harris & Company LLC will offer protection from litigation for the use of scabs during a strike.
As you can see with this tiny sample of a massive industry, the United States may not be the bastion of death squads it once was during the hey day of armed class war in the decades preceding the Second World War, but the suit and tie finks and their private Blackwater-style goon squads are in full effect. Perhaps it's time we figured out a strategy of taking this industry out into the open and challenging them in the court of public opinion as well as in the streets, and the entrances of our mutual employers.
