
Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem - acjohnson55
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html?mwrsm=Facebook
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asher_
I'm a little confused by this article.

There was no suggestion that these systems were built to intentionally produce
certain outcomes for particular races or sexes, which leads me to believe that
these outcomes are "pure" effects of the ML algorithms that use race or gender
as inputs.

Assuming this, is the author suggesting we -should- be coding racism and
sexism into these systems to achieve "fair" outcomes? She didn't come out and
say it, but I'm not sure how else to read the article. This sounds absurd to
me, and would be acting against what machine learning is supposed to give us.

I'm assuming women are shown less ads for highly paid jobs because other ads
are, in general, more profitable to show (and by extension more relevant on
average). One thing I like about AI is that it doesn't suffer from biases in
the same way we do. Why would we want to make it do that?

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flukus
This one stood out to me:

> A very serious example was revealed in an investigation published last month
> by ProPublica. It found that widely used software that assessed the risk of
> recidivism in criminals was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black
> defendants as being at a higher risk of committing future crimes. It was
> also twice as likely to incorrectly flag white defendants as low risk.

Is skin color even something that is fed into the algorithm? It could just as
well be other factors like number of convictions or socioeconomic background.
Just because it produces an output that worse for black people does not make
it racist.

Aside from that, do we want it to be fair or do we want it to be right?

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NetTechM
Considering it is an opinion piece from the times, I am going to guess that
very little actual research went into this.

Let me see some code that alludes to racism or sexism and not just an
analytical algorithm that says yes, this guy that has a long history of being
arrested has a good chance of being arrested again.

I highly doubt that biometrics are being used to assess these things when
proven data is exponentially more reliable.

