Welcome to Decoded Reality!¶

Decoded Reality is a creative exploration of the Power dynamics that shape the Design, Development, and Deployment of Machine Learning and Data-driven Systems.

Take a look at our visualization here!

A person is sitting by his/her laptop and writing code. Bits(0/1) are emerging out of his laptop and rising into the space above. There are two holographic shapes of people. The first is sitting with it’s knees up and the bits rising out of the laptop are forming chains around its hands and ankles. The second is levitating above space and the bits are forming wings around it.

The development of ethical AI¹ is all about Power². Power dynamics determine what work we fund, who we build models for, and what problems we try to solve³. The AI accountability gap⁴ enables the ones in power to justify self-interest under the garb of utilitarianism, while the vulnerable are disproportionately affected. The invisible hand of concentrated power has been long overlooked in both scholarship and discourse, but it is the critical confounding factor that renders purely philosophical or purely technical interventions on algorithmic decision-making systems ineffectual.

In this piece, we present dystopian realizations of how algorithmic interventions manifest in society, in an attempt to provoke the viewer to think critically about the socio-political underpinnings of each step of the engineering process.