Between 120 and 150 IT workers will be fired from the McClatchy newspaper syndicate (Scramento Bee, Miami Herald, etc), after they have trained IT contractors from India’s Wipro to do their jobs.
Some of the affected workers have filed for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), which expands unemployment benefits to workers whose employers have offshored their jobs.
The move was announced in a remarkably (even by corporate America’s standards) tone-deaf, jargon-laden, corpspeak letter circulated in the company, which referred, in its seventh paragraph, to firing the longterm employees as “a realignment of resources requiring a reduction in McClatchy technology staff,” noting “this action is necessary for us to realize the benefits outlined above and help the company achieve its long-term goals.”
Don’t worry, the Wipro workers will be laid off next year and their jobs assumed by IT AI. We’ll have the press release from Wipro with the Wipro CEO in that story. And a year later a story about Wipro’s CEO being replaced by an AI reporting to the board of directors, most of whom are human beings. Most.
Driverless judiciary? It’s not scfi, it’s here today according to the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court:
When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last month, he was asked a startling question, one with overtones of science fiction.
“Can you foresee a day,” asked Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the college in upstate New York, “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?”
The chief justice’s answer was more surprising than the question. “It’s a day that’s here,” he said, “and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things.”
He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison based in part on a private company’s proprietary software. Mr. Loomis says his right to due process was violated by a judge’s consideration of a report generated by the software’s secret algorithm, one Mr. Loomis was unable to inspect or challenge.
In March, in a signal that the justices were intrigued by Mr. Loomis’s case, they asked the federal government to file a friend-of-the-court brief offering its views on whether the court should hear his appeal.
The report in Mr. Loomis’s case was produced by a product called Compas, sold by Northpointe Inc. It included a series of bar charts that assessed the risk that Mr. Loomis would commit more crimes.
The Compas report, a prosecutor told the trial judge, showed “a high risk of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” The judge agreed, telling Mr. Loomis that “you’re identified, through the Compas assessment, as an individual who is a high risk to the community.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Loomis. The report added valuable information, it said, and Mr. Loomis would have gotten the same sentence based solely on the usual factors, including his crime — fleeing the police in a car — and his criminal history.
At the same time, the court seemed uneasy with using a secret algorithm to send a man to prison. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, writing for the court, discussed, for instance, a report from ProPublica about Compas that concluded that black defendants in Broward County, Fla., “were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher rate of recidivism.”
Justice Bradley noted that Northpointe had disputed the analysis. Still, she wrote, “this study and others raise concerns regarding how a Compas assessment’s risk factors correlate with race.”
In the end, though, Justice Bradley allowed sentencing judges to use Compas. They must take account of the algorithm’s limitations and the secrecy surrounding it, she wrote, but said the software could be helpful “in providing the sentencing court with as much information as possible in order to arrive at an individualized sentence.”
[…]
He added that Mr. Loomis “was free to question the assessment and explain its possible flaws.” But it is a little hard to see how he could do that without access to the algorithm itself.
The company that markets Compas says its formula is a trade secret.
“The key to our product is the algorithms, and they’re proprietary,” one of its executives said last year. “We’ve created them, and we don’t release them because it’s certainly a core piece of our business.”
And what if there is no ‘algorithm’ to review? Deep learning techniques are not based on code written by humans, they are based on neural networks that learn, like human beings do. In that case, what could Loomis have asked for?
Walking down the street outside work, passing a UPS woman with a package-laden cart.
About half are Amazon Prime, another half are Blue Apron, and there is a single lone package from somewhere else.
[I wrote this in 2012, inspired by a talk from Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Union.]
In a world where our traditional institutions – and their leaders – are hopelessly out of date and failing at insuring our well being, we know that something new has to take their place. And fast.
Whatever the individual paths that led us to this insight, we need to first find solidarity in a challenging and chaotically changing world, because the financial and political forces that are increasingly influencing our economic and political systems seem to have small concern for us. Consider the growing income inequality in the US, as an example.
We, who have come to realize that we are living precariously, living at great and increasing risk due the actions of failed institutions and broken policies, must rapidly move past the passive, consumerist, individualist mindset of the industrial era.
We, the Precariat, need to create alternative institutions, controlled by us and dedicated to investing in activities that will benefit us, rather than global corporations and the magnates that control them. We need to find common cause and grow local, regional, national, and international mutual associations, owned by the members and dedicated to decreasing the staggering risks that confront us, individually and in common. These organizations can be as diverse as unions dedicated to protecting the interests of freelancers (like the Freelancer’s Union), local food cooperatives, or international policy organizations.
Mutualist Manifesto:
We need to commit ourselves – individually and collectively – to finding common cause and the general recourse to a mutualist response to problems that confront us at every scale: in our neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations and globally. We can’t wait to be saved by others.
Core mutualist principles:
Ownership and governance of new institutions by members.
Benefits-based, not profit-based, organizational principles.
Cooperative orientation toward asset allocation, investment, and distribution of benefits.
Mutual support of the activities of other mutualist organizations.
I am searching for organizations, think tanks, and non-profits dedicated to these – and commonsist – principles.
Our food coop, with all of its maddening and much-ridiculed imperfections, is one.
Looked for Cape Town travel books and ended up down the rabbit hole of amazing South African literature that I will never have the time to read, courtesy of Amazon’s algorithms…
I don’t even know how useful these travel books will be for anything other than stoking regrets for the things I’d miss outside Westlake – apparently known for golf courses and business parks – and the place where I’d be staying.
There used to be a time when I could bookend these trips with the time off for nearby adventures, and now I am having a hard time accepting that this reality will never come back.
Need to learn to roll with it.
I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.
tinfoilparachute 