Prompt response
We’ve been closing our eyes to the perils of AI, assuming we have time to ‘sort it all out’. That time is now, says Murgia, in her new book, Code Dependent. As the British-indian science journalist set out to explore how AI is already affecting lives, she saw, over and over, examples of its harms. The faultlines of capitalism are showing up too, in what was meant to be a flatter, fairer, braver world rights can any of us hope to retain?
Excerpts from an interview.
The story of artificial intelligence is not the story of rockstar CEOS and Silicon Valley geeks. It is not really about Big Tech’s sizzling stock prices and unicorn start-ups. The AI story is about you and me; our days, our jobs, our way of life.
But there is currently little acknowledgement of this. We marvel at AI’S progress and potential, but avert our eyes from the plight of the poor and the powerless caught in its crosshairs. And we do this at our peril, because we are at least one of those things.
This is something Madhumita Murgia underscores both subtly and undeniably in her debut book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI (March; Picador).
Murgia, 36, the first-ever AI editor at the Financial Times, UK, does this through stories about how AI is already affecting ordinary people’s lives.
In Chinchpada village in Maharashtra, we see how algorithms can help doctors in the resource-starved public healthcare system with diagnoses, analysis and care. But we are also transported to low-income settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, and refugee housing in Sofia, Bulgaria, where workers are being pushed to label more data per hour, as part of the effort to train the AI juggernaut always waiting to be fed.
The book offers first-hand accounts of women who have had deepfake images and videos of themselves uploaded on pornographic websites, and we see what such manipulation can do to the life of an ordinary person going about their day.
Code Dependent ropes in gig workers, who talk about how the algorithms have made their precarious lives more uncertain, as they facelessly recalculate work allocations and wages in ways that are not just complex and opaque, but leave no room for contestation, protest or a court of appeal.
In the massive data-labelling industry that has sprung up around the world, this vital if mundane work earns employees cents per labelling task. Should they not be paid commensurate with their contribution, Murgia asks. In her question are echoes of the firebrand Telugu poet Sri Sri (Srirangam Srinivasa Rao; 1910-1983), who asked in his seminal work Maha Prasthanam (The Great Journey to a New World):
“Taj Mahal nirmaanaaniki raallettina koolilevvaru?” (On whose bent backs were the marble stones of the Taj Mahal carried?)
Murgia points to how the faultlines of capitalism — where the rewards of innovation accrue to a tiny minority, despite the vast labour majority required to realise the potential of that innovation — are already being mirrored in what was meant to be a flatter, fairer, braver world.
The trade-offs required are already complex, and we’ve only just begun.
Which is why Code Dependent offers a clarion call: This is not a matter of a near-future; it is a matter of now. If we cannot build a new social contract, we need to ask ourselves: What
Will AI disproportionately benefit the wealthy, its harms falling disproportionately on the marginalised?
I would say that that’s exactly what I discovered during the reporting of this book. I went into it agnostic. I was curious to see how AI has changed lives, for better and worse and everything in between.
The healthcare case with Dr Ashita Singh in Chinchpada was the shining spot. Everywhere else, I saw the harms of AI: bias, hallucinations, errors in decision-making systems, discriminatory outcomes.
We need to think not just about how the technology itself works, the biases within the systems, and who it is all harming, but also: How do we bring this to the people who need it the most? Who is going to subsidise that? And who is accountable when these systems go wrong?
I saw multiple examples, whether with predicting crime amongst children in Amsterdam or with deepfake pornography, where things went very wrong but there was nobody you could hold responsible.
Accountability should be a big part of rolling AI out across society.
Is data colonialism a risk too? Are non-western voices being inadequately represented, as this technology is shaped?
We don’t have enough representation from different cultures, and partly that’s because the infrastructure, the money, the chips and the expertise are highly concentrated in the West, and possibly in China. In terms of solutions, India and other countries are starting to think about how they can build their own systems.
I think open-source models are a big way in which we can democratise that process. The more we can have engineers and computer scientists access these models and build with them, the more we’ll be able to have a thousand flowers bloom, essentially, around the world.
You’ve written in the past about AI and climate…
The energy question is huge. Many of the Big Tech companies are trying to offset the impacts of their data centres, but that’s all going to be reversed if you’re trying to build a massive trillion-parameter model with millions of chips. There is going to be an impact on the environment.
It is said that one of the goals is to essentially use AI to make an energy breakthrough and have it solve the problem of powering itself. But that’s nowhere near a reality yet.
What gives you hope, when it comes to AI?
With my immunology and biology background, science and healthcare are the areas that I think could be transformed for the better. It could help us not just make breakthroughs but take those to people that we don’t reach today.
That’s where I feel really excited and optimistic. I’m excited to see this change.
The energy question is huge. It is said that one of the goals is to essentially use AI to make an energy breakthrough and have it solve the problem of powering itself. But that’s nowhere near a reality yet. MADHUMITA MURGIA
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Murgia’s first job as a journalist was at Wired magazine, where she wrote widely acclaimed stories on the data-broking business. She moved on to The Telegraph, UK, where she continued to report on evolving technology; then to the Financial Times, UK, in 2016. She has reported on artificial intelligence for more than a decade. 3
The idea for her book, Code Dependent, came to her while she was on maternity leave following the birth of her second daughter. Murgia says the time away from work allowed her to step back from it all and zoom out. The book has been shortlisted for the inaugural 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-fiction, which celebrates narrative nonfiction by women.
It’s been 100 years since the first TV set was built, using a hatbox and needles, among other things. K Narayanan looks back on the race to make it to market, begin broadcasts; the golden era of TV that came next. And how we still point our furniture in its direction, though the screen we’re looking at is rarely that far away – and the broadcasters are, well, all of us
In the TV show Macgyver, the titular protagonist has a talent for cobbling together solutions to unforeseen technical problems using whatever is at hand. The show and the character became so popular that “to Macgyver” entered the Merriam-webster dictionary as a transitive verb. The Scottish inventor John Logie Baird could have given Macgyver a run for his money. He built the first working television set in 1924, using, among other things, an old hatbox, some darning needles, bicycle light lenses and a pair of scissors.
A scene was illuminated, and the light reflected off the subject and passed through a lens, onto a Nipkow disk, a rotating object with holes arranged on it in a spiral pattern (named after its German inventor).
Light from the image passed through the holes and were converted into electrical signals by a photodetector. These signals were transmitted to a receiver, where another synchronised Nipkow disk recreated the image by controlling the brightness of a light source as it passed through corresponding holes.
Baird, an electrical engineer then in his mid-30s, gave the first public demonstration of this device at a London department store, in 1925. But his device could only transmit images at the rate of five frames per second, yielding a jerky sense of motion.
The following year, the 27-year-old Japanese scientist Kenjiro Takayanagi tinkered with Baird’s system, and instead of the Nipkow disk, used a cathode-ray tube for more accurate rendering. In 1927, the 20-year-old American scientist Philo T Farnsworth perfected the all-electronic TV system. The cathode-ray tube was a glass vacuum that fired dots from an electron gun onto the screen.
For his first demonstration, Farnsworth transmitted a straight line. To physicists, it was a marvellous feat. But Farnsworth’s financial backers were unhappy, so, for his next major demonstration, to the press, Farnsworth broadcast a dollar sign. By 1930, there were a few dozen TVS operational around the world, all in research labs. Things were about to change.
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) began to explore the idea of public TV broadcasts in 1929. There were the years of experimental transmissions.
By 1936, RCA was ready. The first major public broadcast was of that year’s Berlin Olympics, televised by Germany’s Telefunken using RCA equipment.
By the end of 1936, BBC had launched “the world’s first public, regular, high-definition television station”.
The most popular telecasts of this period were the coronation of King George VI in 1937, and the first-ever televised Wimbledon, the same year. At this time, most TVS in the world were owned by research institutions, government offices, engineers and hobbyists. Still, the US lagged somewhat in adoption.
Then, in 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, Franklin D Roosevelt became the first US President to have a speech televised. RCA, almost a decade and several million dollars in, finally had a commercially viable TV set available too. The public was soon riveted.
In July 1941, the first TV advertisement aired, before a baseball game. It was a 10-second spot for Bulova watches, and showed, in shades of grey, a dial superimposed on a map of the country, with a voice intoning: “America runs on Bulova time.”
There would be a lull, as the war put the rapid expansion on hold, but the ’50s saw the medium explode. It spread around the world. It changed the face of broadcasting, and the way people spent their leisure hours.
The main genres formed: comedy, daytime specials, detective noir.
George Burns and Gracie Allen, Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason, all launched vaudeville-style comedy shows. The first bona fide TV superstar was born, with Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy. Soap operas such as Guiding Light kept a largely female audience glued to their TVS during the day. Raymond Burr became the ultimate Perry Mason.
By the ’60s, TV had become an integral part of life in the West. The 1960 US election proved that TV had changed politics too.
A newcomer named John F Kennedy, 43, defeated a newcomer named Richard Nixon, 48, and polls suggested that a key factor had been the former’s telegenic personality.
Kennedy would not get to finish his first term; the assassination in Texas would be the first of many events that would unfold globally, in real time, as news bulletins, prompting people to ask: Where were you when you first heard... that Kennedy had been assassinated (1963); that Indira had been shot (1984); that the twin towers had fallen (2001).
The other common question: Did you see: this band of kids called the Jackson 5 sing I Want You Back on The Ed Sullivan Show? (1969); Kanhaiya Kumar chant Azaadi (2016).
In what seemed like no time, the box had altered politics, protest, activism, mobilisation, in echoes of what the internet would do a few decades later.
It changed how funds were raised (1.9 billion people watched Paul Mccartney’s mic fail at Live Aid in 1985, in a concert that raised millions for famine relief across Africa). How products were sold (the teleshopping market is currently worth an estimated $47 billion).
It gave women a platform through which to reach other women around the world. Oprah Winfrey first beamed across America in 1986. Journalists such as Christiane Amanpour and Barkha Dutt in 1983 and 1991 respectively. By the 1990s, Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson were redefining what it meant to be a homemaker.
In India, Doordarshan began daily broadcasts in 1965.
This was content that united a widely disparate India. We all knew the Ek Chidiya song (1974), and understood what it meant. The obsession with cricket intensified, with the 1983 World Cup being the first such tournament televised live nationally. Mile Sur (1988) rang out on Sunday mornings, reminding us that we were many voices, and we were one.
This was not the cathartic, larger-than-life India of cinema; it was the small everyday victories and sorrows of Wagle ki Duniya (1988), and of our world too.
This was the peak of broadcast television. Today, it is becoming something of a matter of pride to say one doesn’t own a TV set. The ideal screen is smaller, mobile, loaded with memory of what you liked and didn’t.
The market for TV sets is still growing, but some of the most-watched networks of today don’t broadcast, they stream. 3 Body Problem and Fallout, Heeramandi and Laapataa Ladies are not on TV.
TV is dead. TV will never die.