Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
The Dream Hotel (A Novel)
By: Laila Lalami
Narrated By: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan
Laila Lalami (Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor, earned a PhD in linguistics, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for “The Moor’s Account”.)
Laila Lalami imagines a “Brave New World” in which algorithms predict probabilities of lethal criminal behavior. She creates a nation-state with a human behavior monitoring and detention system for every human that might commit a lethal crime. The growing collection of data about human thought and action suggests a level of truth and possibility.
Lalami creates a state that monitors, collates, and creates probability algorithms for human behavior.
To a degree, that state already exists. The difference is that the algorithms are to get people to buy things in capitalist countries and jail or murder people in authoritarian countries. One might argue America and most western countries are in the first category while Russia, and North Korea are in the second.
Lalami’s description of the detention system, like many bureaucratic organizations, is inefficient and bound by rules that defeat their ideal purpose.
A young mother named Hussein is coming back from a business trip. She is detained because of data collected on her about where she has been, what she did on her business trip, her foreign sounding name, and the kind of relationship she has with her husband and twin children. An algorithm has been created based on a profile of her life. It flags the young woman so that she has a number slightly over a probability threshold of someone who might kill their husband. Of course, this is ridiculous on its face. Whether she murders her husband or not is based on innate errors of behavioral prediction and bureaucratic confusion.
Every organization or bureaucracy staffed by human beings has a level of confusion and inefficiency that is compounded by information inaccuracy.
That does not make the organization bad or good, but it does mean, like today’s American government’s bad decisions on foreign aid or FDA bureaucracy throws the baby out with the bath water. Lalami’s point is that detention because of one’s name, family relationship, and presumed prediction for murder, based on a digitized life, is absurd. Algorithms cannot predict or explain human behavior. At best, an algorithm has a level of predictability, but life is too complex to be measured by a fictive number created by an algorithm.
The author makes a point in “The Dream Hotel”, but her book is a tedious repetition of the risk of human digitization that is a growing concern in this 21st century world.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 