New Model of Poverty by Satellite Imaging

Celebrity · Aug 21, 2016

How ethical is this new technology? Researchers used a predictive model across two sets of data to come up with accurate statistics for average spending and average household wealth.

Similar to this technology is a machine learning algorithm for connecting people in India who lack electricity.

The final computer model was “strongly predictive” of two important measures of poverty – average spending by households and average household wealth. In Rwanda, for instance, the model predicted average household wealth more accurately than data from cellphone records, according to the study. (Another problem with cellphone records: They’re proprietary, and companies aren’t always willing to share them.

Here is the Stanford study for nerds: http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2015/162_report.pdf

joG · Aug 21, 2016

Celebrity said:
How ethical is this new technology? Researchers used a predictive model across two sets of data to come up with accurate statistics for average spending and average household wealth.

Similar to this technology is a machine learning algorithm for connecting people in India who lack electricity.

Here is the Stanford study for nerds: http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2015/162_report.pdf

What do you think might be unethical?

Celebrity · Aug 21, 2016

joG said:
What do you think might be unethical?

The surveillance state is an ethical dilemma. On one hand, is it an invasion of privacy or does it provide robust statistics for use in the public domain? On the other hand, should the state even be in the picture when information about our private lives is being capitalized upon in the private sector?

Caveat emptor: if you mess up the grid, not only will you fail to adequately provide a service such as a utility, but you will be remembered alongside other environmental polluters like Gazprom, Shell, or even the government of Ukraine (owners of the Chernobyl plant). I'm sure networks designed to match these models will have fault tolerance as a priority, but the implementation in society comes with a risk. If you know how much money some community has, can that data be bought and sold? How will that affect trade?

joG · Aug 22, 2016

Celebrity said:
The surveillance state is an ethical dilemma. On one hand, is it an invasion of privacy or does it provide robust statistics for use in the public domain? On the other hand, should the state even be in the picture when information about our private lives is being capitalized upon in the private sector?

Caveat emptor: if you mess up the grid, not only will you fail to adequately provide a service such as a utility, but you will be remembered alongside other environmental polluters like Gazprom, Shell, or even the government of Ukraine (owners of the Chernobyl plant). I'm sure networks designed to match these models will have fault tolerance as a priority, but the implementation in society comes with a risk. If you know how much money some community has, can that data be bought and sold? How will that affect trade?

I am not really sure of the answers to you questions. But I do not see this as a topic concerning "ethics", but as one of efficiency of a society. Can the society adopt a higher technology to raise its capabilities for planing, allocating tax money to the best use and solve social problems like crime without putting itself in danger of collapsing into dictatorship or uncontrolled majority rule? If it cannot, it is by definition falling behind its efficiency-optimum frontier. So how do you adopt the new technology without losing your freedom?

Celebrity · Aug 22, 2016

joG said:
I am not really sure of the answers to you questions. But I do not see this as a topic concerning "ethics", but as one of efficiency of a society. Can the society adopt a higher technology to raise its capabilities for planing, allocating tax money to the best use and solve social problems like crime without putting itself in danger of collapsing into dictatorship or uncontrolled majority rule? If it cannot, it is by definition falling behind its efficiency-optimum frontier. So how do you adopt the new technology without losing your freedom?

Yes, the use of this data will most likely be bundled with census data as useful demographic information. There will likely not be laws put in place to regulate the use of this new technology, until there is sufficient public outcry. The same thing happened with drones, the technology was developed first and the rules specific to drone technology came later. Of course, there may have been some background for UAS, but the scale of regulation is still being developed in municipal government.