[bonobo3000]

IMO, no one wants to acknowledge simple facts for fear of retribution/being labelled racist, instead we keep dancing around this issue forever getting more and more ridiculous.

Also, trust me i can talk about this because i'm not white...

fact - people prefer people like them. Not even consciously, this is basic shit hardwired into us. I don't blame white men for being subconsciously biased to hiring white men, literally any other group would do the same. sure we can try to fight that bias, but its not at all evil or wrong to have that bias, only natural.

fact - taking an "agnostic" approach the way science does, of course the algorithms will reflect "biases". if men are statistically more likely to be programmers, or black people are more likely to commit crimes (STATISTICALLY), then the algorithm will pick that up. They are biases sure, but also statistical realities.

Now we can debate whether we should actively engineer algorithms to fight these "biases" on a case-by-case basis (for example, focusing more on women might be a win if you can find talent no one else can), but there's no reason to start pointing fingers at the "evil white guys" on top who planned this from the very beginning... it's just more stereotyping.

hypothesis - she wrote this crap to gain publicity.

[sangnoir]

> if men are statistically more likely to be programmers, or black people are more likely to commit crimes (STATISTICALLY),

I think you meant black people are more likely to be convicted of crime. The problems with crime 'statistics' is that on the surface, it all seems coldly scientific, yet they are generated and derived via very biased, very human, very unscientific processes - there is a lot of bad data. The ACLU did research that showed that there is no statistically significant difference in the possession of weed between white and black people, yet more black people are convicted[1] for possession.

Here's a mind experiment: after watching this YouTube video[2], how skewed do you think the statistics for white female criminals (bike thieves) vs black criminals would be?

1. https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg

[loop2]

If that's the case, there must be a hell of a lot of unconvicted white murderers to make up for the 7:1 disproportion.

[bonobo3000]

Yeah, i don't really know enough to argue that. You're probably right about the convictions.

I just think we need to be able to TALK about these issues, so that when a real expert looks at those statistics they can get to the truth of the matter, and say that truth whether it is or isn't politically correct.

[elevensies]

I would phrase it this way:

The law says racism is illegal in certain situations, and society says racism is undesirable in most situations.

The law and society aren't claiming that racism is statistically non-optimal -- in fact, there are lots of things more optimal than status quo that many people would find totally horrifying.

If are widely replacing human systems with AI systems, I think this is a legitimate concern.

I really depart from the article in two areas:

1. The AI will inherit the biases of its creators. This is possible but far from guaranteed. And relatedly, inclusivity of the development team guarantees nothing regarding the goals of the system.

2. Criticising the people who are warning of the problem and trying to do something about it. This is related to the AI control problem. There is no switch that can be flipped that will prevent AI systems from Bad Ideas. It's not that we just aren't flipping it to preserve our chokehold on captialism. Implementing morality in AI systems is a genuinely monumental problem. And the people who are doing something about it are behaving very altruistically.

[bonobo3000]

Agreed! If we did nothing to correct inequalities in society, the biggest and strongest would rule over all - so yes we must have our own values and stick to them.

And with AI, we must make these values explicit, which is very difficult to do - i agree this is a very important problem to solve, and the people doing it should absolutely be rewarded.

Honestly, reading the article again after your summary i found it very reasonable :p I think the headline just ticked me off.

No one is stopping other people from getting in on the debate, they absolutely should (and I'm sure there are roadblocks in their way, and people who really are racist). It just feels wrong to implicitly all the "bad white people" for that. Blame those who cause the problem. Otherwise we are back to stereotyping.

[jimmywanger]

Certain terms are ill defined in your statement.

"The law...". Whose law? "Society says...". Which society? "Implementing morality". Whose morality?

Also, why wouldn't you want things to be optimal, depending what what they're optimizing for? I thought optimizing was the exact point of machine learning and AI.

[elevensies]

The laws I had in mind when writing are US protected classes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

By society I was thinking of Western society. Wikipedia lists equality as value in 2nd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_culture

By morality I was thinking along the lines of socially accepted behaviour in the contemporary United States, and mainstream Christian morality which isn't the official state religion, but in my opinion the basics of it are taken as a given in politics, government, media, and academia.

Overall, I'm referring to mainstream anglo law, society, and morality.

> why wouldn't you want things to be optimal, depending what what they're optimizing for?

The reason is that when you express your goals, you don't fully understand what the consequences will be. There may be consequences that are totally repugnant to you. The child-story level version of this is where you get a genie which gives you your wishes in a horrible way: i.e. I wish to be the richest man in the world, and so the genie kills everyone else. I want a nice big house like my parents, and so the genie kills your parents and you inherit. Et cetera.

Telling the computer to do what you want is notoriously difficult for simple imperative programming, to the point where many people think a large fraction of the population just isn't up to it intellectually, and if you need proof of this you can search for fizz-buzz interview stories. Setting up goals or incentives for a system that behaves in a way the you can barely understand is even more difficult.

[toomuchtodo]

Agree! A few citations to complement your post.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2005/pr05...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/in-the-end-people-may-re...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3336375...

http://conf.som.yale.edu/obsummer07/PaperBen-NerKramer.pdf

[emsy]

If you change the label of the datapoints, say black to apple and white to oranges, you'll change racism to fruitism. It's unlikely that a racist system would do that.

I do agree with the article that feeding biased data will result in a biased system and we need to be aware of that. But calling it racist and sexist is sensationalism.

[untilHellbanned]

Thank you. I want to say stuff like this all the time, but I'm a white guy so its a non-starter.