Good Code is a weekly podcast about ethics in our digital world. We look at ways in which our increasingly digital societies could go terribly wrong, and speak with those trying to prevent that. Each week, our host Chine Labbé engages with a different expert on the ethical dilemmas raised by our ever-more pervasive digital technologies. Good Code is a dynamic collaboration between the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech and journalist Chine Labbé.
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On this episode:
Julia Angwin spent years covering technology at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica. Now, she is embarking on a new adventure: a soon-to-be-launched newsroom called The Markup.
Its goal? Investigating technology, and the way it impacts society. Its secret weapon? Data-driven journalism, produced by a staff that is made up of half journalists and half technologists.
We ask her about the need for such a newsroom, we discuss some of her past work, and we talk about her hopes and fears for the future. Our conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.
You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, YouTube, and on all of your favorite podcast platforms.
We talked about:
- We discuss a ProPublica piece called Machine Bias. It’s about a software used in certain US jurisdictions to predict a defendant’s likelihood of committing crimes in the future. And we talk about the debate it sparked on the meaning of “fairness”.
- We mention the internal protest that arose in 2018 at Google over an AI contract with the Pentagon. A petition was signed, some employees resigned and Google eventually said that it would not renew the controversial contract.
- Should the codes for algorithms be open, in order to avoid biases? Sure, why not. But an open code might not be enough, Angwin warns. Sometimes,the bias lies in the training data, as the infamous 2015 Google Photos incident showed, she says. It was tagging black faces as “gorillas”.
- In September 2018, Fortune warned of the “legal perils” The Markup could face because of its reporting tactics. Read about the lawsuit filed by the ACLU to try and obtain an exception to the law for academics and journalists.
- When she was at ProPublica, Julia Angwin revealed that Facebook was allowing discriminatory ads on its platforms. Then, the company thanked her on Twitter for doing so.
Read more:
- To learn more about The Markup, you can join their mailing list here.
- You can also read this New York Times article from September 2018.
- To learn more about Julia Angwin, check out her website or follow her on Twitter.
- Good Code also recommends her book Dragnet Nation, a fascinating read on her attempt to evade online surveillance.
