{"id":18017,"date":"2021-04-26T11:48:59","date_gmt":"2021-04-26T11:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barazalab.com\/?p=18017"},"modified":"2023-09-04T05:40:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T05:40:31","slug":"the-77-days-of-january","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tuwele.com\/baraza_update\/the-77-days-of-january\/","title":{"rendered":"The 77 days of January"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings, friends:<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of saying \u2018I hope this newsletter finds you well\u2019, I\u2019m instead going to say I hope you made it through the 77 days of January relatively unscathed. I have been thinking about vaccine nationalism, algorithms and the limits of tech (a heavy week, as you can see). This weekend, Twitter suspended access to the account of @thecontinent_, a WhatsApp-distributed weekly pan-African newspaper. The apparent offence was a tweet promoting one of the stories in this week\u2019s edition, <\/span>that critiqued<\/span><\/a> the injustice of unequal access to the coronavirus vaccine, and Bill Gates\u2019 outsized role in instituting what the story called \u2018vaccine apartheid\u2019; Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, has called the situation a \u2018catastrophic moral failure\u2019. Rich countries are hoarding far more of the crucial doses than their populations needed, leaving less-rich countries with only untested or expensive alternatives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Within hours of publishing a tweet promoting the story, Twitter had suspected @thecontinent_\u2019s access to their account, labelling the tweet as misinformation. It was likely that this was inadvertently set off by an algorithm triggered by key certain words – possibly having \u2018Covid-19\u2019, \u2018Bill Gates\u2019 and \u2018vaccine apartheid\u2019 in the same tweet. After this, @simonallison was also suspended from Twitter, for calling for the restoration of The Continent\u2019s account.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Allison regained access to his account by the time we were publishing this newsletter, and it may seem like a little storm in a digital teacup. But something about that incident had me thinking a lot about the potential troubling outcomes of automation and AI. Already, there is facial recognition technology that <\/span>claims to be able to guess<\/span><\/a>, with \u201creasonable accuracy\u201d a person\u2019s political affiliation and sexual orientation just by looking at their face. There\u2019s also a disturbing resurgence in race science – the claim that empirical research exists which proves that certain races are superior to others.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is all the rage now, touted as the development of \u201ccyber-physical systems\u201d involving entirely new capabilities for people and machines. But we would be well to think of these little storms now, before the teacup develops all too new capabilities. I\u2019m only half-joking.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, here\u2019s –<\/span><\/p>\n