Meredith Broussard’s “Artificial Unintelligence” Chapter One Response
Meredith Broussard is a professor of data journalism and an author whose work focuses on how technology is used and how it should be used. I didn’t know what was meant by “data journalism” so I looked into it. I found a website appropriately called datajournalism.com that explains “data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics,” (Bradshaw). This reminded me of the concepts of data humanism and data literacy.
Data humanism is about connecting data from the sources of which it was created and collected, which are often people. People generate data that can be observed and taken to be analyzed, gathered, and presented, and since people are not perfect and neither is the process, the data itself should be presented in a way that does not dismiss outliers or messiness. The complexity should be embraced and presented in a way that preserves this, but it still accessible for a general audience. This then relates to data literacy, which is the ability to understand what data represents and to communicate this as information.
Meredith Broussard’s book “Artificial Unintelligence” addresses this as well, but more in the way of technological literacy. Chapter one of the book sets up the fact that technology has often been seen as a new, exciting, limitless thing that will shape the world in incredible ways to form a more perfect society. Broussard says that many people seem to still buy into that vision of technology and the future even though “the tech revolution has already happened; tech is now mundane,” (Broussard). This vision is closely tied to the concept of technochauvinism, which is the belief that technology is the appropriate answer to any problem. Broussard wants people to understand that yes, technology can provide meaningful answers, but only if it is the appropriate answer to a problem, and it may not always be appropriate.
The belief that technology is an objectively good tool that will lead us to a utopic future is severely misguided. Technology is built by people who have biases, who have limits to their knowledge, and who make mistakes. Deciding what is important to develop or use technology for can lead to biased or partial technology. This limits technology to only achieve what we build it to achieve, and it is also limited by our knowledge. In chapter one of her book, Broussard states “ultimately, everything we do with computers comes down to math, and there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with it.”
Reading just this chapter alone of Broussard’s book helped me better understand the focus of the Digital Studies minor, which I believe is really to familiarize us with technology. Many of us have grown up with all these devices at this point so we feel very comfortable with it, but we are actually not very familiar with how tech works, why it works the way it does, and what we can, and can’t, do with it.
