News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Amazon Echo as a map of human labor, data and planetary resources. Parent comment

Re:The Amazon Echo as a map of human labor, data and planeta... by elvinyung on Sunday September 09, 2018 @05:50AM (#17945163)
Just curious, what parts made you think that? Kate Crawford is a very well-respected researcher on the sociological and cultural aspects of "big data". Her perspective might not be purely technical, but her descriptions of these productive processes seem very in line with a lot of the other conceptualizations (mostly in the humanities) of data as labor, which I think is the most important part.
[ Parent | on HN ]
[deleted]
Re:The Amazon Echo as a map of human labor, data and planeta... by elvinyung on Sunday September 09, 2018 @03:41PM (#17947380)
So Crawford doesn't actually ever assert that MTurk is used directly for Alexa, only that it's one common form of commoditized data labor, of which the internal teams of annotators is actually another good example.

The language thing is even more interesting. If you read Crawford's research, her whole thing is about how machine learning is full of bias, for example about how AmazonFresh availability maps resemble 1930s segregation maps. Yes, it gets kind of philosophical on the discussion, and I'm nowhere near qualified enough to get into a discussion about this, but the thing that I'm curious is, how much does the data reflect the biases of those language engineers?

[ Parent | on HN ]