A Return To Social Credit Scores
Remember this number, 64372583928503. There will be a quiz later.
This idea of a “social credit score” has been bothering me. For example, China famously charges people for jaywalking and automagically pulls money from their account when a surveillance camera catches them in the act. No court needed.
The movie, Minority Report, portrays a world using predictive analytics to stop crimes before they even happen.
Target famously predicted that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did.
Examples abound.
All of these, and others, are manifestations of social credit scoring. Social credit scoring involves looking at data to monitor and assess how trustworthy an individual is, and then giving them certain benefits or doling out punishment based on their score. Basically, governments determine your eligibility for certain benefits based on a scoring system.
Let’s think of social credit scoring as an arbitrary spectrum. Your social credit score correlates with the freedom you have in a society. To be fair, we can’t give people freedom. It’s not ours to give. Freedom is the default, but we can take it away, usually using threats and coercion.
Generally, the better your score, the more freedom you have. Those we deem to have low credit, we give low freedom. The extreme ends of the spectrum are people that can do anything, and the other end has impoverished, incarcerated people.
Social credit scores are not one-size-fit-all, yet. The main thing to note is that social credit scoring is a phrase to describe the variety of ways that we determine how we interact with other people in social settings.
People worry that social credit scores will only continue to restrict freedom. RFID chips for every human. Purely digital currency, where every transaction is monitored by the state.
But, the idea of a social credit score isn’t new at all. We’ve had them forever, whether or not we realize it. We constantly judge the trustworthiness of others. We use social credit scoring as individuals when we determine whether or not a friend is flaky. We all have a friend that routinely shows up late. We make adjustments, using the classic, “Give them a time 30 minutes before the actual time,” or we assume that they may not show up.
Similarly, companies decide whether or not you’re likely to perform well at a job based on history, tests, and referrals.
Even when we lived as tribes, social credit scores existed. Generally speaking, consequences varied relative to the impact of an action. Actions that decreased the survivability of the tribe as a whole carried greater weight than those that didn’t. Tribal survival was paramount.
There are a number of key points that come up when considering social credit scores:
- Privacy and anonymity
- What we measure
- Consequences
All of these are important and blend together in a soup.
Before getting into the consequences of social credit scores and how they’ve shifted over time, we need to understand privacy and anonymity, and what we measure.
A Short History Of Privacy
This infographic neatly explains how privacy has changed over time.
This infographic is taken from an article titled The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images. The author generally argues that, historically, we didn’t have privacy, then we got some privacy, and now it’s going back to where it began and is disappearing. You can’t have a social credit score and privacy. Social credit scores fundamentally rely on the opposite of privacy — your behavior gets tracked and graded to create a score. No tracking, no scoring. They are linked.
But, the author misses a few things. The key point isn’t that in the past there was no privacy and that in the future there won’t be any again. There have been massive shifts along the way. We aren’t returning to our caveman past; we are crafting a tech-enabled future.
This future comes without privacy and anonymity, which leads us to the second big thing to consider with social credit scores.
What We Measure
Okay, quiz time. Without scrolling, tell me the string of numbers at the beginning of this article. I bet you can’t.
But, for a computer, this task is a joke. The machine you’re reading on can store and retrieve long strings of numbers that are beyond what your mind can comprehend.
Now, storage lies in computers all over the world, with backups of backups. Because of this shift in storage, we can afford to measure much more. Everything is tracked, forever.
When we all lived in caves, credit score was determined by human memory. Storage was in our heads. We tracked what we remembered. And, usually, we remember large, important events and major life milestones.
Minor transgressions were lost thanks to the adage “forgive and forget.” Our minds can’t afford to store trivial events. They run out of space. Now that the task of remembering has been relegated to machines, there is no forgetting and no forgiveness.
This shift from ephemeral to permanent storage, combined with the expansion of what gets stored (everything we can think of) also influences the third key point when it comes to social credit scores.
Consequences
In our current legal system, our methods of sharing evidence are horribly crude compared to a tech-enabled future. What we track is already here; we just haven’t turned it on. All we need to decide is whether or not law enforcement can use it against us, which the Patriot Act already allows.
But, that is federal legislation. Wait till we have trickle-down surveillance, where smaller localities begin the same.
Plenty of tech journalists, pundits, politicians, and titans of industry have made predictions about where we are heading. For example, Balaji Srinivasan tweeting about how people are migrating. For the record, he has many related tweets; this is but one. Think of all the Californians who moved to Austin, Texas or the New Yorkers who moved to Miami, Florida. Basically, if you’re in a city that judges you to be a second-class citizen per your social credit score, you have a strong incentive to move to another one. For example, not being able to eat at restaurants in New York City without sharing private health information.
But, “How will governments shift?” isn’t a great question. After all, governments are just groups of people.
What matters more is, “How will WE transform”?
Currently, our collective consciousness feels somewhat infantile. It is shifting though. It’s never static anyways. Punishment is our most common method for behavior change right now, and it is also the least effective.
Until we decide to use another method, our technologies will be used mostly for punishment.
That begs the question, if WE want to be different, how can I be different?
Crafting A Personal Credit Score
If we judge ourselves inaccurately, we will do the same to others. Poor discernment leads to problems for ourselves and others. So, a better way to begin judging other people is to cultivate a better way of judging yourself.
As humans, we go around projecting all the time. So as we learn to score ourselves kindly, we learn to do the same to others. After all, that’s what a credit score is — a tool for judging. This doesn’t mean being blind or ignorant though.
“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.”― Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything
Here are some ways to recalibrate how you judge yourself, with the intention of boosting your skills of discernment.
- Exposure therapy: expose yourself to a variety of people, places, ideas, and things. Put more simply, travel.
- Take psychedelics: One of the most common effects of a psychedelic experience is refraining from violence as a means of problem-solving. For the record, this is grossly oversimplified.
- Practice a growth mindset: Growth mindsets help decouple effort from outcome and remove unnecessary judgments.
- Be the change you wish to see. As Marcus Aurelius said, “The best revenge is not to be like that.” If someone is unfair, be extra fair. If someone is unkind, be more kind.
There will be many other steps, but such is life. A marathon is run one step at a time.
If we want different outcomes, we need different inputs. Remember that if I am different, then we are different. Because I am part of the ‘we.’
Drew,
Πηγή: stegdrew.com
