[AndrewKemendo]

Individual (or aggregate) human researchers are not hooked up in huge services to make inferences and deductions automatically about billions of people

Yes they (we) are. It's the same data set. TV, movies, papers, internet videos et al. is all the same biased, labeled data that is being fed (watched, listened to etc...) to machines. You automatically make inferences and deduce things about people based on labeling and training of your brain. You're constantly fine tuning by getting new weights about things through interactions with others and media.

[coldtea]

>Yes they (we) are.

I didn't say researchers and/or individual people are not making such judgements about billions of others (e.g. "the Chinese suck/are great").

I said they are not "hooked up in huge services" to make them automatically for billions of individuals -- like an ML algorithm used by Google or Amazon or some government agency etc would do.

[AndrewKemendo]

My point is that it's the same thing. Individuals with outsized power and influence can affect billions of people based on their own judgments and implicitly make those judgments automatically for billions.

That's what this question is all about - should machine systems be responsible for the kind of sweeping decisions that humans are making on those populations now? Probably.