Mat

Murder

One of the things we do with computers is track flows of information and correlation between different nodes in graphs. Everything we are and do makes up a graph which has for most of human history been invisible to us. With the advent of social networks, wide scale surveillance, and machine intelligence which can parse unstructured data, we can now create a more accurate representation of this graph.

Our legal system encodes the idea of being an accessory to crimes like murder, but it doesn’t have a way to assign a precise and negligible amount of murder to an individual. That would be too expensive without having it be automated. That is what we are capable of building now.

It seems likely to me that everyone in the first world is responsible for a non negligible amount of murder in other countries as a result of their lifestyle. The common trope is to point to sweatshop workers or workers dying mining for precious metals. The aforementioned graph may finally give us a more exact measure of things like neocolonialism and their roots.

It also seems likely that technology workers have much higher murder scores than others as a result of the impact their products have had. How many murders have been made possible by the invention of the internet? What about by people who work at a social media company and give in too much to their boss who is kind of a jerk sometimes?

This isn’t an argument against technology, but an observation that we will have the ability and responsibility to consider affects many more orders away that we currently do. Ultimately when we have the full graph, everyone who looks will be forced to acknowledge their complicity in crimes they may have previously thought deserved permanent excommunication from society. It will be a heavy burden but also an opportunity for individuals to have positive impacts at a scale that was previously impossible.