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https://areenaakhter.medium.com/compassion-for-the-computer-scientists-be207afdf426>
"This piece is the first in a series of reflections on what I’ve learnt so far
from studying and working on ‘human-centred’ algorithm development. My thesis
across these narratives will probably become evident: that we are facing an
urgent need for human-centred engineering, embedded into education, the way we
design and evaluate algorithms, and within the ethos of the tech industry
itself. As evidenced by initiatives like the Leverhulme Centre for the Future
of Intelligence’s Decolonizing AI project, one of the greatest limitations of
today’s technological ecosystem is that it was imagined by predominantly male
engineers who assumed that they understood the problems faced by their users
better than anyone else (like say, a social scientist.)
Throughout the early 2010s, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously reiterated
that his social network “wasn’t a media company.” As a helpful consequence,
this meant that his engineers could claim to be simply responsible for building
a platform to distribute social content — but not for what was published there,
or how it might influence society. It was only years later that whistleblower
Frances Haugen was able to reveal how many intentional decisions Facebook’s
engineers made to build algorithms that they knew could harm their teenage
users.
In today’s era of AI, it’s finally become clear to the everyday consumer how
influential the algorithms around us are: we game the TikTok For You Page, tune
our Netflix recommendations, train our IG Feeds. What the consumer often
forgets is that there are engineers like myself actively tuning the dials
behind these predictive devices.
As I’ve built my early career working on recommendation and personalization
algorithms, I’ve been faced with nebulous dilemmas about where we draw the line
on our moral responsibilities as software engineers. At the same time, the
lessons I’ve arrived at are entangled with my emotions about the way I had to
learn them, and so this article is also a ruminary on how it’s felt to be a
woman in computer science who loves who she is outside of the industry, but had
to give some of it up to assert my place here.
To be clear, I love my work as a software engineer. I would just like to change
how we learn how to become one."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
