![]() ![]() Often, there is more arguing at this point, and tears. Anyone who has had a kid or been a kid can tell you what happens next: there’s a negotiation over who gets which half. In the real world, when kids divide a cookie in half, there is normally a big half and a little half. Mathematically, giving each kid 50 percent is fair. Everything computers do is quite literally a computation. This mathematical solution is how a computer would solve the dispute as well. Each kid would get half of the cookie, or 50 percent. If this story were a word problem in an elementary school math workbook, the answer would be obvious. I admire her more for the times she didn’t step in and let us work out the problem on our own. Today, as a parent myself, I admire my mother for stepping in hundreds of times to resolve these kinds of kid disputes. (As adults, we work in adjacent fields, and there’s still a fair bit of good-natured back and forth.) At the time, our cookie conflicts seemed high-stakes. My brother and I squabbled about everything as kids. When there was only one cookie left in the jar, my brother and I bickered about who got it. It was a mutually beneficial system-until we got to the last cookie. If I heard my little brother opening the jar, I wandered into the kitchen to get a cookie too. The porcelain lid clanked loudly every time a kid opened the jar for a snack. It was a large porcelain jar with a wide mouth, and often it was filled with homemade cookies. When I think of a cookie, I think of the jar my mother kept on our yellow Formica kitchen counter throughout my childhood. (A sweet and crunchy one, like you would eat-not like the cookie that you have to accept when visiting a web page.) Unfortunately, it is not a big enough step in the right direction. Often, when people talk about making more equitable technology, they start with “fairness.” ![]()
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