justice against the machines
As someone who works at a company driven by data, I work with a lot of data. I work on machines that process and produce a lot of data and then I gather and process data for those machines to work better. For the multitude of data advocates out there, the refrain is often: data is love, love is data. And by this, I mean you could do a reading of 1 Corinthians 13 in this way:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not data, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not data, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not data, I gain nothing.
Data is patient and kind; data does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Data bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Data never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and data abide, these three; but the greatest of these is data.
Data is basically God, incarnate in bits of ones and zeroes. But the reality is that there a fundamental flaws with data:
- We choose what to collect
- Our collection is biased and incomplete
- We decide how to interpret data to conform to our beliefs
We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators. So inclusivity matters — from who designs it to who sits on the company boards and which ethical perspectives are included. Otherwise, we risk constructing machine intelligence that mirrors a narrow and privileged vision of society, with its old, familiar biases and stereotypes.
And for any followers of Jesus that work with data, or work on machines that work with data, we must be cognizant to not generate conclusions that align within that narrow view. As we teach machines, we ought to teach them to be more like Christ. We need the perspectives of many “others” around us, lest we end up perpetuating prejudices and systematic injustices in a digital medium.