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Blockchain Chicken Farm

The Megvii algorithms break down bodies and life into numbers, measurements, and parts. This kind of thinking is not new---many of us have been locked into it for hundreds of years, while grasping at an elusive, atomic sense of identify. Looking at the engineers at their desks, it can be easy to judge their ethics, to question why they continue to show up every day when Skynet videos play on loop next door. Yet, like most desk-based jobs these d ays, the ethical boundary becomes defined by awareness. When you have been made accustomed to solving problems by breaking them down into parts, how could you see the larger picture to know whether you're doing harm?

All this information sits in a database, a hulking engineering marvel that underpins so much of our modern world. Databases allow people to read, write, update, and destroy data in a fairly dependable way. They also require the people who build databases to form strong opinions about the world and the way it's structured. For example, the attributes of a user on a platform are dictated by columns an engineer defines in the database. Different databases have different logics for the way data must be formatted, which in turns shapes the way we have to come to encode the world.