“Affordances,” a science-fiction story by Cory Doctorow about algorithmic bias.
Each month, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives—publishes a story on a theme. The theme for October-December 2019: artificial intelligence.
“We’ve got to call you something” the supervisor said as he wrote “BILL 2892” on the name slate. That was the first day, and BILL 2892 discovered shortly thereafter that he was to be called 92, not Bill, because there were 2,891 other BILLs that had transited through the system, and several of them worked in the same building where 92 was assigned to. (It was Building 34, and there were lots more just like it, in a row that stretched all the way down the portlands, each long structure elevated on identical stained pillions that were striped with a series of high-tide lines that crept upward in the weeks and months and years that came after the first day.)
Before he was 92, he’d had many names, and before that, he’d not had any. The other kids called him YOU or KID or ASSHOLE, and the grown-ups they begged from called them FUCK OFF. Then there were the police who called him SONNY and SHUT UP, and then the teachers who’d called him Muhammed or—if they were white—Moe. He didn’t see much of the teachers because almost all of the teaching was on screens, and once he could pass the proficiency test, he’d been taken to the supervisor (name-badge: Mr. Iskal Dungog) and he’d become 92.
