I have been in a tangled feeling along with reading the book, Weapon of Math Destruction.
We get much convenience from the abundant services of all kinds of information feeding, such news notifications ,shopping recommendations,music suggestions, even ads sometimes. We can get to know the basic information for daily life during in the subway to office in the morning without needing to subscribe news papers and journals magazines, to pay much attentions to look for sales events. The world seems going towards perfect with the coming of Information Age and AI.
However the book lists many cases of WMD, revealing its negative results from the perspective of downsize. I got to wary of the horrible consequence of savagery developing, evolving and applications of WMD in various areas, including educations, finances,policing, etc.
This reminds me of a word, “melon-eating masses”, which is newly produced by Chinese netizens and went viral in the recent 2 two years in China . There are many versions about the origin of the new word. The major one is from an elderly who was interviewed by a reporter. In the interview, the elderly said “I know nothing about it, I was just eating watermelon on the roadside”. From then on, the Chinese internet users, often use it to describe a massive group of passive onlookers at a major incident or event. In my opinion, the fired teacher, a victim of the WMD, is a member of “melon-eating masses” for she couldn’t figure out why he got such a low score as to be fired. The single mother, who can’t arrange well his child care any more after the introduction of precise algorithm to calculate the job time, could be also a member of “melon-eating masses”, who might be only able to accept the “truth” that the technology advance is improving the efficiency of work, without doubting of the fairness of the algorithm. The designer and developers of the computing models, the privileged politicians, could also be members of the “melon-eating masses”, with scale expanding of data collection, he complexity deepening of algorithm and the neural network getting more and more entangled, and getting out of control on the plans plotted by themselves. The new word created in China internet reflects a society phenomenon of that the mass are a little desperate with the current situation of pool access to the real information and are looking for forward to the governors to regulate and rule the data usage, business modeling, information feeding.
Good to see that yesterday it is reported: Facebook takes down hundreds of pages and accounts that were spreading false or misleading political content ahead of the midterm elections.
