In this short piece written by Sam Biddle for The Intercept, America’s favorite fear is questioned. Are we in a “Cyber War”? This question is not new, nor is it specific to the United States. Our people have long battled with technological advancement, for many reasons, chief among them the opportunity to manipulated said technology beyond its intended use. In 2016, the United States was thrown into a frenzy as it grappled with the idea that a foreign entity may have (and ultimately understood to certainly have) hacked their way into the presidential race. Why then, do we continue to push the boundaries on what is acceptable replacement by computers?
Since 2016 things have only worsened. Every month, we hear about a new hot app that the kids are downloading, and the next week we hear details of how it is actually a backdoor for foreign entities to spy on the American people. Technology, well intended or not, fails regularly, but “every crummy app failure is going to give us pangs of techno-conspiracy”, says Biddle. There is a mixed bag of reactions, but the bag is ripping at the seams and needs to be sorted. Many don’t care. They believe that things will either fix themselves, or that it is just a part of living in a connected world. They latter half of the sentiment is not wrong, flaws will exist in every computer system, but it is misguided. What citizens of every nation need to care about, and draw their attention to, is that not everything needs to be a computer system. Why do we need an app to collect polling data, conflicted interest of its developers and poor implementation aside, when “it’s quite harder to hack a thin sheet of tree pulp and ink”?
The growth of the computing industry is immutable, but to what end? When we can achieve the same results, safely and efficiently, without the use of a computer, we should. Larger and larger portions of the computer science sector seem to believe that computers are not meant help aide humans, but to do things for them. This will lead to not only disruptive polling results, but potentially catastrophic failure of valuable systems that belong in the hands of someone capable of empathy and ethical thought. This idea that there is always a way to do something better when you code it into a phone app is incredibly irresponsible and has caused yet another form of terror leaching into the every day life of people all over the globe. There is a saying, ‘if its not broke don’t fix it’. Should this become a part of the code that computer scientists are expected to follow? Maybe, with a bit more nuance.
Source Article: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-results-elections/
Social Structures & Algorithms 