Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia dissects the ‘artificial’ of AI i.e. the artificial intelligence that’s rapidly taking over the world even as we breathe and eat and do other mundane, regular things. She traces this ‘artificial’ in a 3-D sort of way, turning inside out for her reader. For a non-fiction book, her tone is intimate, almost like a robotic, grandmotherly storyteller of future world is sharing a bedtime story with her kiddroid.
Artificial Intelligence in our everyday life
AI is “a complex statistical software applied to finding patterns in large sets of real-world data,” and ChatGPT is one such generative tool. The author looks at how it affects the people who train the AI, use the AI, and often end up being victimised by it. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction in 2024, this is a book that tells you how a tech can mark children as future criminals.
From college to art, from food-ordering app to lectures and movies and call centres, customer care centres, banks, cars and car showrooms, artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s in deepfake videos of women, putting their morphed images out in the world. It’s the plastic of our silicon valley.
Omnipresent.
Half of us don’t even know we are talking to a silicon chip when we reply to ‘How may I help you today?’. Who do you think you are taking to when you say ‘Alexa, play me a peppy bollywood number’, or when you order Siri to dial a cousin who lives in Chennai.
It’s now creeping into your socials in the form of a blue circle on WhatsApp and Instagram. But is AI only limited to our professional and, in a limited sort of way, our personal lives? How long is it now that we might have an AI like in the movie Her? Will we be doomed like Theodore, the bumbling man played by Joaquin Phoenix?
Murgia recounts many incidents in which artificial intelligence interfaces and the data collated from AI-based software and programs impacts humans in myriad ways. A few chief cases are described here.
The Dark Side of AI
It’s ironic that the rock that artificial intelligence stands upon is built by very human hands. But it intends to sprout wings and fly far away. In the book, Murgia tells an eye-opening incident about ProKid, a profiling software used by the Dutch police to predict a young person’s vulnerability to commit crime simply based on data from their “previous contacts with the police, their addresses, their relationships and their roles as a witness or victim.” She enumerates more such black holes where people in authority and those with dexterity upon tech make sweeping generalisations.
In another instance, when a group of researchers developed a software to diagnose COVID-19 they used data collated from chest X-ray of pneumonia patients in the control group, which included data of kids aged 1 year – 5 years.
The machine learning model, instead of differentiating pneumonia from COVID-19 based on the X-rays, wrongly distinguished children from adults. This led to multiple wrong diagnoses, spread of infection, fear in patients and their families and chaos in the hospital and dispensaries.
Does AI selectively target the marginalised?
Morgia writes: ‘A person’s freedom is threaded inextricably with the quality of their agency- their ability to perceive their actions and desires as their own.’
We see social media manipulation of the public openly stated in manifestos from governments to world organisations and defence bodies under the pretext of ‘keeping people safe or ‘protecting measures’.
The author touches on this in the chapter “Your Rights”, which discusses criminal uses of facial recognition software and how Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was sued for their social media algorithm potentially facilitating murders in Ethiopia. The case study illustrates the dark side of technology, showing how technology can easily be used for oppression. The book is chock full of such case studies, showing us how artificial intelligence has mostly affected the people teetering on the margins.
Code Dependent in its essence goes against its own title; it argues and sets up a case in favour of the subjects such as worker and refugee rights and global economies rather than the artificial intelligence.
As I wrote the review, I could see a few news flashes blinking in the corner of my laptop, an article on how many people have lost their jobs after the advent of AI. When the computers were introduced, the excuse for this reduction in jobs was targeted at efficiency. Now with AI, what excuse do staunch flagbearers of this tech have?
