by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department
We have always been slightly troubled by the Parable of the Talents from the Book of Matthew (a Talent was worth around 6,000 Denarii, which given a single Denarii was a payment for a day’s work in the fields, this was about 20 year’s labour!). With our background in Investment Banking one could be forgiven for thinking we too would understand the rewards for the servants who turned this huge sum into something far larger, and the servant who buried it away to ensure that he lost none before his Master returned, being scorned (it actually says: “…cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” - Yikes!).
However, given there is a direct relationship between risk and reward, and in those days where the ‘Master’ was often all powerful, and absolute, the ‘risk’ should we have lost it all on a risky venture in an effort to gain the Master’s undying love and affection, would have without doubt been horribly ‘absolute’. That ‘risk’ we are sure would have been far too much of a responsibility for us, to say nothing of our families, so we have a great deal of sympathy with the servant who simply buried the money to keep it safe.
Although we understand this parable was celebrating those who took great teachings and then went onto teach others and through that built a far larger community of like-minded believers, and those who wasted such an opportunity should be ‘scorned’, this parable now reflects in a negative way so much in our present day lives. In academia for example, eminent scientists will often get the credit over others even if their work is similar, as credit is given to those already famous, so they become yet more famous and the gap between them and others widens further (remember the Talents were not handed out equally either - the ‘best’ servant got 5, the next 2, then 1, so there was already a bias to those already built or ‘baked' in). This was first highlighted by Robert K. Merton, who called it the Matthew Effect (here), from the book of Matthew.
Other examples include education where poorer areas of a City will not have the same access to great teachers and facilities as the more well off, and so the gap widens between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ (obviously there are outliers to all of these examples); the ability to afford the better nutrition and diet that will impact health and much more; likewise water and sewage infrastructure; bestseller books or music will increase in popularity when they hit the ‘bestseller’ list (we are herding animals); even in our favourite subject - funding, where raising the first cheque is the key to unlocking so much more, then the more you raise, so the more funding that trundles through the front door. Then of course both in Science funding (here) and our old favourite gripe - why 80-97% of funding gravitates towards male owned and run businesses (here). Why? Not only do they have the funding, which brings in more funding, but this steroid shot of finance allows them to grow faster than women’s businesses who are forced to bootstrap, so this self-prophesying result simply increases the assumption that it must be better to invest in men, and the hey-presto! The gap continues to widen!
‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’
Throughout the ages this has never changed, indeed not even Covid could stop this - according to Oxfam (here): “…for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90% in the past two years, each billionaire gained roughly $1.7m.”
So how will this change as we move into the brave new world of AI?
Sadly, as it currently stands, AI will simply join the party and exacerbate the iniquities. If we do not fast become aware of the imbalances being baked into the AI ‘brain’ and solve them fast, then life will become ever more lop-sided.
AI is only as good as the data fed into the system. The Economist magazine says in their article ‘Bias In, Bias Out.’ (here): “Demographic skews in training data create algorithmic errors. Women and people of colour are underrepresented and depicted with stereotypes.”
This continued ‘baking in’ of the biases, and reinforcing existing imbalances and inequalities is what AI is doing as it builds its thought process and so it was sadly with little surprise that we came across our title photo (here) this weekend that has mapped the information produced in the paper: ‘Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research’ by Koch, Denton, Hanna and Foster (here). In this they state:
“We find increasing concentration on fewer and fewer datasets…Our results have implications for scientific evaluation, AI ethics, and equity/access within the field.…In fact, over 50% of dataset usages in PWC [‘Papers With Code’] as of June 2021 can be attributed to just thirteen institutions. Moreover, this concentration on elite institutions as measured through Gini has increased…to the mid .80s [!] in recent years…”. [‘Gini’ is an index that measures the equality of a distribution vs inequality, zero being perfect equality, 100 being not - so wealth across the globe to represent the (in)famous ‘1%’ would have a Gini of 99 or .99 as it is sometimes written.]
This is shocking.
moz://a's Internet Health Report 2022 says: “The companies with resources to invest are carving out competitive advantages. And the countries with access to engineers, large amounts of data, and computational power, are consolidating their dominance of software and hardware in ways that impact how AI is deployed worldwide…the benefits - and the harms — are not evenly distributed.”
A massive percentage of the globe has to rely on representation by these 13 elite institutions and countries with the access, in an area (AI) that will have a massive and controlling impact on our lives. So many will continue to sit at the bottom of the heap, crushed by the weight of ‘elite’ knowledge being fed into these machines that although have the power to do good, have immense power to forget and ignore.
Surely the ‘third servant’ has something more to look forward to, other than “…outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The poet John Milton was fascinated by the parable and wrote about his deep feelings for the iniquities so expressed in his sonnet:
When I Consider How My Light is Spent.
When I consider how my light is spent
‘Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent, which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."
Lest we forget in our rush for the future, for ‘progress’, for instant gratification, for global domination -
…They also serve who only stand and wait.
Stay safe.