During Covid-19, in the absence of in person exams, the government created an algorithm to assign A-level grades. It was designed to be fair – based on historic school results and teachers’ assessments of individual students – but it ended up discriminating against students from poorer backgrounds, whose schools typically performed worse in the past and whose class sizes tended to be bigger.
Tech is neutral, but we are not
Human subjectivity still dictates how technology is used.
Amazon’s AI recruitment tool only served to highlight existing prejudice, downgrading female CVs because they were historically less successful. The tool was scrapped in 2018.
What explains the variation in uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine? For the most part it wasn’t due to technology, or availability, but cultural resistance to vaccinations. Countries like the USA. & Turkey had uptake of 65%, while it was over 90% in Hong Kong and Singapore.
They can be used to create life and end it (explosives). It depends who’s in charge.
The Holocaust – perhaps the ultimate symbol of human evil – wouldn’t have been possible without a highly advanced railway system (Reichsbahn). At its peak, 1.6 million workers were employed to develop the network – the main transportation to concentration camps. One historian called the Reichsbahn “the largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1945.”
Contrary to popular belief, Viagra doesn’t increase sexual desire – it only potentiates your natural desire by relaxing the blood vessels in the penis. In other words, you still have to be up for it to be up for it. According to Murray Blacket, a psychosexual therapist, “before Viagra, erectile dysfunction was thought to be up to 90% psychological and 10% organic. With everything put out by the drug companies over the years, that’s now reversed. It’s seen as mostly an organic, physical problem.”
VAR has only helped to magnify the subjectivity in Premier League refereeing; it just means those decisions now take several minutes, and they happen in an office not on the pitch.
Britain wouldn’t have cracked the German code without the Enigma machine – but they wouldn’t have done it without human creativity either. To narrow down the 159 quintillion possible combinations, the Bletchley Park team made educated guesses at certain words the message would contain; for instance they knew that the German forces sent out a daily ‘weather report’, and they knew that most messages would contain the phrase ‘heil Hitler’.