AI & I

Through her book Code Dependent—shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction—Madhumita Murgia gives voice to the voiceless multitudes impacted by artificial intelligence

- ANJULY MATHAI

Over a decade ago, when Madhumita Murgia was starting out in journalism (she had studied biology and clinical immunology at Oxford and then worked on developing vaccines for HIV), she became curious about the world of data brokering—where shadowy companies “collect data about our online lives and turn them into saleable profiles of who we are today, and who we will one day become”. To make the story more tangible, she decided to track down the profile of someone she was intimately familiar with— herself. She contacted an ad-tech startup to decode the information collected about her from her own web browser. The report they sent her of an ‘anonymised version' of herself included her profile put together by Experian, a credit-rating agency that doubled as a data broker.

The report was shocking, not just because of the personal details it contained—from where she worked and lived and how she spent her money to the holidays she had taken in the past year—but also because it detailed her opinions, interests, and personality traits, from her TV-watching habits and food preferences to her level of ambition and political leanings.

This was really her baptism into the murky world of data colonialism, big tech, surveillance, and artificial intelligence. “My life—and yours—is being converted into such a data package that is then sold on,” she writes in her new book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI. “Ultimately, we are the products.”