Good morning, Quartz readers!
Machines judged a beauty contest last year and the winners, chosen from photographs women had submitted, were overwhelmingly white. Meanwhile, a Microsoft chatbot went from wide-eyed naïf to misogynist Nazi sympathizer after just a day among trolls on Twitter.
It’s clear that artificial intelligence can learn to be racist or sexist from human interactions. And of course AI doesn’t just receive bias, but can even propagate it by recreating tradition gender roles in service-oriented software, for example.
It’s worth thinking about this in the context of the recent #MeToo campaign, where people shared their experiences and thoughts on sexual harassment and assault.
Perhaps because of the way social feeds work, it can appear that men have kept relatively silent in the conversations that have followed the allegations of decades of sexual harassment and assault by Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein (a spokeswoman for Weinstein has said he unequivocally denies allegations of nonconsensual sex). It can be scary to think of joining in a conversation that in some way seems to be “not about you,” or when you fear being told what you think and feel is wrong. Some men say they’ve been motivated not to keep quiet and listen by the idea that men dominate conversations in real life (and in pop culture).
But think of the traces those decisions leave—or rather don’t leave. We think of “big data” as something amorphous and separate from humans. But data is formed by millions of our daily interactions. For example, in the future, some algorithms may allow artificial intelligence to group together a bunch of tweets under the label “sexual abuse,” while other algorithms allow it to understand that the Twitter handles attached to these tweets largely includes names considered “female.” What will the machine make of that?
Communication may be still a human endeavor, but we live in a world that is increasingly shaped by machine intelligence, and it’s worth thinking about what machines may learn about humanity by what we say—and the gaps they may fill in by what we don’t.—Tripti Lahiri
#MeToo
Perhaps the only positive thing to come out of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s not-so-secret life as a sexual harasser being split open is the multiple conversations that have burst forth as a result. Quartz writers dove into that conversation: Lianna Brinded reflected on the true meaning of being “woke,” Leah Fessler offered some practical yet tough advice for men, while Thomas McBee considered the systemic “toxic masculinity” that has made sexual aggression so ubiquitous.
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
The art of making an ethical decision. Most of us have strong gut instincts about what’s right and wrong. But history shows that common sense can often lead us astray. Olivia Goldhill’s profile of Oxford philosopher and longtime vegetarian Jeff McMahan explores how one man goes about weighing his intuition and rational thinking—particularly when it comes to the question of whether it’s OK to eat meat.
Five ways science could make you invisible, ranked by the inventor of a real-life invisibility cloak. From H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man to cloaking devices in Star Trek, science fiction has long found ways to make people and spaceships disappear. And that might be closer to reality than you think. Metamaterialist Dr. David R. Smith of Duke University created the world’s first invisibility cloak, and he takes us through the physics behind each, from nonsense to near-reality.
We used to kowtow to corporations. Now they kneel down to us. We’re in the midst of a profound shift in consumer culture, Marc Bain writes. Corporations were once king, but “influencers” and viral videos—like the one of the United Airlines passenger-dragging incident that shaved $1 billion off the company’s valuation—have shifted the balance of power. A new report examines how US buying behavior will change as a result.
Touring a secret vault for bitcoin millionaires. Bitcoin may be a revolutionary digital asset, but keeping a stash of it safe requires protections that look very much like banks of yore. Joon Ian Wong was granted access to an ultra-secure bitcoin vault belonging to the firm Xapo, located in a decommissioned Swiss military bunker near Zürich. Read about the paranoiac levels of security built into this facility, including nuclear bomb-proof vault doors.
Mozambique’s forgotten “East Germans”. Thirty years ago, 20,000 young Mozambicans were encouraged to leave home for work in factories across the former East Germany. They hoped to acquire skills and return to help their newly independent, Communist-supported country. But it turns out they were being used. Sami Kent met some of the now middle aged men who protest every week in downtown Maputo over unpaid salaries from a country that no longer exists.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
The high cost of being wrong in social science. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy gained international fame for her research on the beneficial effects of “power poses.” Then her colleagues began to criticize her methodology, and she became the poster child for psychology’s replication crisis. Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus takes a sympathetic look at how Cuddy was caught in the crossfire at a time when the standards in her field were changing—and asks what it means when professional critiques get personal.
Twitter’s apathy over its India harassment problem. Violent hashtags and high-profile abuse incidents have become frighteningly normal for users in Twitter’s fastest-growing market. Buzzfeed’s Pranav Dixit uncovers the shocking extent of this harassment and details how the platform’s inaction epitomizes how western companies with global ambitions tend stumble in international territories.
Don’t sleep on the mattress wars. More than $1 billion of the $14 billion US mattress market is expected to end up online this year, up from just $300 million two years ago. That shift has been led by companies like Casper, which is now suing mattress bloggers over their middling reviews of its product, claiming false advertising. In Fast Company, David Zax investigates this Wild West, where the mattresses are firm but the rules aren’t.
If you like your heads of state well-read, unflappable, and millennial, France has the man for you. Emmanuel Macron shakes hands like no one else. He winks a lot. He doesn’t sweat through his tastefully expensive shirts. In speeches, he references Hegel and Spinoza. But for French people, writes Emmanuel Carrère for the Guardian, “this Prince Charming effect is dissipating.” There’s a growing suspicion that there’s little substance beneath the shiny veneer. Carrère spent a week with Macron and concludes—well, there is no conclusion with Macron. He both is and isn’t. And that’s the problem.
The moral case against having kids. In perhaps the ultimate antithesis, David Benatar paints a bleak view of the world in which life is simply not worth living for most people, and therefore having children is immoral. His essay in Aeon explores the history and philosophical roots of “anti-natalist” theory, which posits that “even if life isn’t pure suffering, coming into existence can still be sufficiently harmful to render procreation wrong.”
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, lightly-tested mattresses, and ultra-secure bitcoin vaults to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day, or download our apps for iPhone and Android.