Algorithms are everywhere. They guide our online search. They suggest friend that ‘ we may know’ on the Facebook . Doctors are using them to detect cancer. Police are depending on them to predict crimes. We cannot easily detect them. It is therefore difficult to check how much of our life has come under them. They do not leave a paper trail behind. The content that we enjoy on the Facebook, the adds that we receive in social media platfors, the music that we listen on Spotify , the movies that we watch on the Netflix are all suggested by algorithms. It seems that our decisions are highly influenced by algorithms. We are steadily stepping into an age of Algocracy.
With each click, we feed the algorithms to know us intimately and this knowledge is then used by algorithms of data analytics to influence our decisions to benefit big business and surveillance capitalism. Several applications of algorithms, thus, serve commercial as well as political interests. But several of them also serve public sector such as health care, education, criminal justice, tax administration etc. Algorithms assist in the optimizing of the public services.
Algorithms are here to stay. They are not going anywhere. We are living a significant transformation of our lives. We have become immense amount of data and the algorithms manage, nudge and control our everyday life. Algorithmic governance is thought to be smart governing where several decisions are taken out of human control. Humanity seems to have become a bottle neck for the speed at which dynamic decisions of administration are taken.
Algorithms bring automation and anticipatory applications along with them. Automation takes away human agency while anticipation seems to leave out human mind. Individuals have become dividuals who defined by the data sets that profile and predict their conduct. Each (in)dividual have become entities with many roles and are represented in data banks. We are steadily put into a digital cage and are told that we are living in a smart city.
The advent of the smart city is Goa is delayed. The delay and chaos around its architecture make us think that the smart city is being build by idiots. Smart city in the capital city is still in the making. It is a techno-futurism that has come to haunt Goa in recent days. It is said that the smart city will make our lives better and smarter. But the called smart comforts come at a cost. We will have to trust machinic intelligence. We will have trust and put our lives in the hands of algorithms.
With human agency being out of algorithmic systems, how are we to fix accountability to algorithms where even the experts that work with them cannot know as the processing of the data is black-boxed to them. The very size of data that is being processed by algorithms is humanly impossible and hence the working of the algorithms remain black-boxed to us. But we have to ponder: Just because, we will get smart public services, are we going to surrender important areas of life to be controlled by algorithms ?
Algorithmic governance is efficient, cost effective and even time saving . We will get our services through single portal without muxh hassle. The question, therefore, is : Do we have sufficient digital architecture that will enable everything to be connected to the Internet of Things? The over-centralization that is required to run a smart city will weaken democracy and individual freedom.
Smart city remains dynamic and governs its citizens minute by minute managing traffic ques as well as people lining up (both virtually and physically) to access bank services , health care, entertainment etc. Policing will become efficient through algorithms that profiles criminals and anticipate their criminal activities. But the question of trust will still remain as some of us may be arrested under prevention of crime only because an algorithms is predicting a possible criminal act and implicate some of the smart citizens.
No algorithm is bias free. They embody biases and ideologies of those who designed them. They also work on data that itself is biased The way we categorize the data and dataized people, we cannot make algorithms bias free. This is why we can say there is no smart city. Smart city is simply a brand that appears to be value-neutral, rational and evidence based. But in its actual workings, algorithms are found to be value biased and even ideological. This is why we may have to ask: Will the coming of the smart city in Panjim will be good for all citizens of Panjim or even other Goans who come in and go there ?
Everyone will come under surveillance and, therefore, everyone will come under the eye of the power. The oculus of power means that everyone in Panjim and in Goa will be digitally monitored by the panopticon ( All seeing eyes of power). This is why we have the challenge to remain anti-Oculus who becomes a disassemblage breaking free from the assemblages of the smart city. We do not have to become digitots. We can use the benefits of the smart architecture for public services but there is a price. We will become data for the algorithms . It is indeed difficult to stay out of the growing algrocracies in Goa. We need to approach as well as enter the smart city with the hermeneutics of suspicion of Paul Ricoeur and challenge its social imaginary that has taken its hold over us. We have to rise above the techno-utopian vision of a smart city. We are fast becoming an Urban-living Lab. Perhaps, we need to a critically advocate for new ethics that will regulate the governing of smart cities.
