Day 129: Book Excerpt: Future Crimes

Black-Box Algorithms and the Fallacy of Math Neutrality

One and one is two. Two plus two equals four. Basic, eternal, immutable math. The type of stuff we all learned in kindergarten. But there is another type of math—the math encoded in algorithms—formulas written by human beings and weighted to carry out their instructions, their decision analyses, and their biases. When your GPS device provides you with directions using narrow AI to process the request, it is making decisions for you about your route based on an instruction set somebody else has programmed. While there may be a hundred ways to get from your home to your office, your navigation system has selected one. What happened to the other ninety-nine? In a world run increasingly by algorithms, it is not an inconsequential question or a trifling point.

Today we have the following:
•  algorithmic trading on Wall Street (bots carry out stock buys and sells)
•  algorithmic criminal justice (red-light and speeding cameras determine infractions of the law)
•  algorithmic border control (an AI can flag you and your luggage for screening)
•  algorithmic credit scoring (your FICO score determines your creditworthiness)
•  algorithmic surveillance (CCTV cameras can identify unusual activity by computer vision analysis, and voice recognition can scan your phone calls for troublesome keywords)
•  algorithmic health care (whether or not your request to see a specialist or your insurance claim is approved)
•  algorithmic warfare (drones and other robots have the technical capacity to find, target, and kill without human intervention)
•  algorithmic dating (eHarmony and others promise to use math to find your soul mate and the perfect match)

Though the inventors of these algorithmic formulas might wish to suggest they are perfectly neutral, nothing could be further from the truth. Each algorithm is saturated with the profound human bias of the person or people who wrote the formula. But who governs these algorithms and how they behave in grooming us? We have no idea. They are black-box algorithms, shrouded in secrecy and often declared trade secrets, protected by intellectual property law. Just one algorithm alone—the FICO score—plays a major role in each American’s access to credit, whether or not you get a mortgage, and what your car loan rate will be. But nowhere is the formula published; indeed, it is a closely guarded secret, one that earns FICO hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But what if there is a mistake in the underlying data or the assumptions inherent in the algorithm? Too bad. You’re out of luck. The near-total lack of transparency in the algorithms that run the world means that we the people have no insight and no say into profoundly important decisions being made about us and for us. The increasingly concentrated power of algorithms in our society has gone unnoticed by most, but without insight and transparency into the algorithms running our world, there can be no accountability or true democracy. As a result, the twenty-first-century society we are building is becoming increasingly susceptible to manipulation by those who author and control the algorithms that pervade our lives.

We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” Facebook never explicitly notified the users affected (including children aged thirteen to eighteen) that they had been unwittingly selected for psychological experimentation. Nor did it take into account what existing mental health issues, such as depression or suicidality, users might already be facing before callously deciding to manipulate them toward greater sadness. Though Facebook updated its ToS to grant itself permission to “conduct research” after it had completed the study, many have argued that the social media giant’s activities amounted to human subjects research, a threshold that would have required prior ethical approval by an internal review board under federal regulations. Sadly, Facebook is not the only company to algorithmically treat its users like lab rats.

The lack of algorithmic transparency, combined with an “in screen we trust” mentality, is dangerous. When big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things merge, as they are already doing, we will increasingly have physical objects acting on our behalf in 3-D space. Having an AI drive a robot that brews your morning coffee and makes breakfast sounds great. But if we recall the homicide in 1981 of Kenji Urada, the thirty-seven-year-old employee of Kawasaki who was crushed to death by a robot, things don’t always turn out so well. In Urada’s case, further investigation revealed it was the robot’s artificial intelligence algorithm that erroneously identified the man as a system blockage, a threat to the machine’s mission to be immediately dealt with. The robot calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to push “it” with its massive hydraulic arm into the nearby grinding machine, a decision that killed Urada instantly before the robot unceremoniously returned to its normal duties. Despite the obvious challenges, the exponential productivity boosts, dramatic cost savings, and rising profits attainable through artificial intelligence systems are so great there will be no turning back. AI is here to stay, and never one to miss an opportunity, Crime, Inc. is all over it.

~~Future Crimes -by- Marc Goodman

Day 113: Book Excerpt: Blood On The Tracks

The Murder of Thomas Briggs

Where better to start than with the first murder on a moving train in Britain? This provoked what – up to then – was the greatest manhunt in British legal history.

You have to imagine Mr Thomas Briggs. He was an aldermanic figure, the epitome of Victorian middle-class respectability. In 1864 he was sixty-nine years of age, tallish, silver-haired, immaculately dressed and sporting a flowing white beard. Altogether, he was a most distinguished-looking gentleman. He was the chief clerk of Robarts, Lubbock & Co., a banking house in the City of London, a position which he had only obtained through a long career of diligent duty and unassailable probity.

He was wearing the kind of clothes he normally wore when travelling to and from work. These included a distinctive high silk hat. He also had an expensive-looking gold chain stretched across his capacious midriff, the chain being attached to a fine gold watch in his waistcoat pocket. He carried a bag in one hand, and a stout walking stick in the other.

On 9 July 1864, a Saturday, he left the office around half-past four and travelled to Peckham, south of the Thames, for dinner with his niece and her husband. Briggs was a widower and he made the pilgrimage to No.23 Nelson Square, now Furley Road, every week. They ate well. They always did. It was still light at half-past eight when he left, his bag now empty because its contents had consisted of little presents for the niece of whom he was very fond. He boarded a horse-bus back to King William Street in the City. He then walked briskly (that was his way; he was very fit and strong for his age), to Fenchurch Street station where he climbed into a first-class compartment on a train of the North London Railway.

He caught the train with a couple of minutes to spare but no one else joined him in the compartment at Fenchurch Street. The train pulled out five minutes late at 9.50p.m. to start the roundabout route to his destination at Hackney via Shadwell, Stepney and Bow. Much of the route ran on low viaducts which gave a bird’s eye view of the rooftops of poor inner-city housing and the myriad of small, often rather noxious, industrial premises and workshops then so characteristic of that part of London’s East End. Hackney, however, was a cut above, boasting a respectable gentility.

The North London Railway had only just over thirteen miles of its own line, but its trains also ran on over fifty miles of line belonging to other companies. The North London Railway had an importance out of all proportion to its size because its small network linked the main lines coming into London from the north and west with the City and with the docks in the east. Its first London terminus was at Fenchurch Street via the circuitous route taken by the train conveying Briggs, but later it opened up services running more directly into the Broad Street terminus. This was a substantial station adjacent to Liverpool Street and which stood where the Broadgate development now is.

It may have been a small company but it was a proud one, and it had little time for the lower end of the travel market. Until 1875 it only catered for first and second-class passengers. It possessed a fleet of small but powerful 4-4-0 tank engines and its four-wheeled carriages were quite luxurious by the standards of the time.

It was a warm evening and almost totally dark as the train trundled along. A weak light in the ceiling provided only partial illumination. Briggs had worked all day, had eaten well, and was dozing fitfully. At Bow he exchanged brief pleasantries through his open carriage window with an acquaintance called Lee, who later averred that there were two other passengers in the compartment. One he described as thin and dark, the other as stoutish, thickset and lightly whiskered. Lee remembered being mildly surprised to see Briggs travelling at such a late hour. He was also surprised by the appearance of the other occupants of the carriage; they did not look like first-class passengers. Later, when he was in the witness box, he admitted that he had had a drink or two in a local pub. The general feeling in court was that ‘a drink or two’ actually meant several, or even many, drinks.

The train pulled out of Bow, being due to arrive at the next stopping place, Victoria Park, Hackney Wick, in a few minutes. The train was now four minutes behind time. The next compartment to that occupied by Briggs was also first class and was occupied by a draper called Withall and a female traveller. They were not together. As the train was approaching Hackney, Withall described how he heard a sudden and strange howling noise, reminiscent of a dog in distress. His unknown female companion made a remark to the same effect. In another compartment close by, a female passenger had the unpleasant experience of being spattered with drops of blood that came in through the open window. She later said that she had heard no untoward noises.

When the train arrived at Hackney, two young men-about-town, Henry Verney and Sydney Jones, were waiting to join the train to travel to Highbury, and they stepped into the compartment in which Briggs had started his journey. It was empty but, although it was very poorly lit, they soon realised that a lot of blood was scattered around the compartment. A number of personal items could be seen. These were a black leather bag and a walking stick. Under the seat lay a black beaver hat, so squashed that it looked as if someone had stood on it. Thoroughly alarmed, they managed to get the attention of the guard who directed them to another compartment.

The guard was intensely irritated by this turn of events. The train was already late and the North London Railway prided itself on the punctuality of its trains. He gave the compartment a quick visual going-over, enough to make it obvious to him that it had very recently witnessed foul play. He locked the compartment and gave instructions for a telegraph message to be sent to the superintendent at Chalk Farm, the station where the train terminated. There the carriage was uncoupled and shunted into a siding to await examination by the police.

Meanwhile the driver of a train proceeding in the opposite direction saw a dark object lying close to the track near the bridge over the ‘Duckett Cut’. This waterway, more correctly known as Sir George Duckett’s Canal, joined the Lea Navigation to the Regents Canal at Old Ford. It had opened in 1830. The train was brought to a halt and the guard, engine driver and firemen all descended to track level to investigate. They found that the object was the body of a man, battered, bloodied and still alive, although only just.

With considerable difficulty, they carried him down to the street where they were fortunate to encounter a police officer going around his beat. He summoned assistance and a doctor was soon on the scene. His initial impression was that the injuries on the left-hand side of the man’s head had probably been sustained by his fall from a train. However, two violent blows had fractured his skull. Briggs’s inert body was first of all taken to a nearby pub which did unusually good trade as the news got around. It was later transported to his home in Clapton Square where he died late the next evening. He never regained consciousness.

This horrible murder stirred up a hornets’ nest of outraged headlines and articles in the newspapers. ‘Murder on the Iron Way’ thundered one newspaper truthfully, while another, tending more to hyperbole asked, ‘Who is safe? If we may be murdered thus we may be slain in our pew at church, or assassinated at our dinner table’. This first railway murder emphasised just how vulnerable passengers in compartments could be to the depredations of malefactors, even in the biggest city in the world.

~~Blood On The Tracks: A History Of Railway Crime In Britain -by- David Brandon And Alan Brooke