Machine Learning’s Crumbling Foundations

Doing ‘data science’ with bad data.

Published in

OneZero

7 min readAug 19, 2021

An industrial meat-grinder; on its intake belt is a procession of recycling bins heaped high with garbage; its output cone has been replaced with the glowing eye of HAL 9000, and it empties into a giant wheeled hopper full of ground-up trash. Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY: https://creativecommons.org

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Machine Learning’s Crumbling Foundations

Doing ‘data science’ with bad data.

Written by Cory Doctorow