Contagion

The mathematician and broadcaster Hannah Fry did some post-doctoral research modelling social disturbance and crime in terms of contagion. In 2014, she gave a presentation at a conference in Berlin about her work with the police attempting to model the patterns of the 2011 London riots. As she said later, it didn't occur to her that a Berlin audience might have a different perspective on police power than a British audience would, and she got (in her words) absolutely torn apart. 2018 video 11:20

Several members of the audience expressed concerns about handing over too much control to the police, not only in giving them the power to suppress different forms of disturbance, but also in biasing the data on which the mathematical models were based. One person asked whether the data could really represent who the rioters were, referring to sociological research showing that police arrests are anything but neutral ... underprivileged groups of society tend to be arrested more. 2014 video 55:40

Another person noted how the riots depended not only on the behaviour of the rioters and the police, but also on the behaviour of the bystanders, which varied in different parts of London. If the Turkish community on London dealt robustly with the situation without relying on the police, this might be linked to the relationship between police and public in Turkey. In her response, Fry also noted the influence of the British media on the behaviour of bystanders in such situations.

While noting concerns about privacy, and agreeing that handing over too much control to technology is a really scary thing, Fry attempted to balance this against the claim that there is something positive to be gained by looking at the macro level behaviour of people in the way that we can design our society. 2014 video 52:50

In her more recent talks, Professor Fry has been more careful to put mathematical modelling into an ethical frame, as well as encouraging people to question the authority of the algorithm.

When it comes to algorithms, you can't just build them, put them on a shelf, and decide whether they're good or bad in isolation. You have to think about how they are actually going to be used by people. 2018 video 11:40

Once you dress something up as an algorithm or as a bit of artificial intelligence it can take on this air of authority that makes it really hard to argue with. 2018 video 26:10

Peter Polack provides a more fundamental challenge to the something positive claim. He traces the genealogy of this idea from August Comte's social physics to latter-day neorationalism, referencing Michel Foucault's notion of biopower and biopolitics.

Meanwhile, if social disorder appears to follow the same mathematical patterns as contagious disease, and the police are being invited to treat crime as a disease, perhaps it is not surprising when disease (or even the possibility of being infectious) starts to be treated as a crime.

The protective measures during the COVID pandemic include lock-down and self-isolation. So-called social distancing really means physical distancing, with as much social interaction as your technology (from phones to Internet) can provide. This is a lot easier for people with reasonably large houses, good internet connections, and devices for each member of the family, as well as the kinds of jobs that are relatively easy to do from home. For people in cramped housing, and for people who actually need to turn up at work if they want to get paid, self-isolation is a luxury they may not be able to afford. Therefore being tested for COVID may also be a luxury they can't afford.

Hannah Fry's mathematical model of the London riots identified that many of those arrested were from disadvantaged areas, although as we've seen this finding can be interpreted in more than one way. A model of disease might also show increased infection in disadvantaged areas. Maps of disadvantage and disease show strong persistence over time, as I discuss in my post on Location, Location, Location, quoting a study by Dr Douglas Noble and his colleagues.

But the COVID testing data are not going to show this pattern if people from disadvantaged areas are reluctant to come forward for testing. So much for biopower then.

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Hannah Fry, I predict a riot (re:publica 2014, May 2014) recording via YouTube

Hannah Fry, Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic (BBC March 2018) recording not currently available

Hannah Fry, Should Computers Run the World (Royal Institution, November 2018) recording via YouTube

Douglas Noble et al, Feasibility study of geospatial mapping of chronic disease risk to inform public health commissioning. BMJ Open 2012;2:e000711 doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2011-000711

Peter Polack, False Positivism (Real Life Mag, 18 October 2021) HT @jjn1

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: August Comte, Michel Foucault

Related posts: Location, Location, Location (February 2012), Algorithms and Governmentality (July 2019), Algorithmic Bias (March 2021)