[chiefalchemist]

Question: So technically, the AI is not bias against women per se, but a set of characteristics / properties, that are more common among women.

I'm not trying to split hairs (or argue), as much as further clarify the difference between (the common definition of) human bias and that of statistical bias.

[zaarn]

Correct.

Computers are very bad at actually discriminating against people, they will pick up a possible bias in a statistical dataset (ie, <protected class> uses certain sentence structure and is statistically less likely to get or keep the job).

Sometimes computers also pick up on statistical truths that we don't like, ie, you assign a ML to classify how likely someone is to pay back their loan and it picks up on poor people and bad neighborhoods, disproportionately affecting people of color or low income households. In theory there is nothing wrong with the data, after all, these are the people who are least likely to pay back a loan, but our moral framework usually classifies this as bad and discriminatory.

Machine Learning (AI) doesn't have moral frameworks and doesn't know what the truth is. The answers it can give us may not be answers we like or want or should have.

on a side note; human bias is usually not that different since the brain can be simplified as a bayesian filter; there are predictions on the present based on past experience, reevaluation of past experience based on current experience and prediction of future experience based on past and current experience. It's a simplification but usually most human bias is based on one of these, either explicitly social (bad experience with certain classes of people) or implicitly (tribalism).

[theptip]

> the brain can be simplified as a bayesian filter

I agree with everything else in your post, but just wanted to note that while this is true to some extent, the brain is much less rational than a pure Bayesian inference system; there are a lot of baked in heuristics designed to short-circuit the collection of data that would be required to make high-quality Bayesian inferences.

This is why excessive stereotyping and tribalism are a fundamental human trait; a pure Bayesian system wouldn't jump to conclusions as quickly as humans do, nor would it refuse to change its mind from those hastily-formed opinions.

[theptip]

> the AI is not bias against women per se

I think I'd make the claim a bit less strongly -- we don't know if there is statistical bias or non-statistical/"gender bias" in the data; both are possible based on what we know.

However exploring the statistical bias possibility, the simple way this could happen is if the data have properties like:

1. For whatever reason, fewer women than men choose to be software engineers 2. For whatever reason, the women that choose to be software engineers are better at it than men

(Note I'm just using hypotheticals here, I'm not making claims about the truth of these, or whether it's gender bias that they are true/false).

Depending on how you've set up your classifier, you could effectively be asking "does this candidate look like software engineers I've already hired"? If so, under the first case, you'd correctly answer "not much". Or you could easily go the other way and "bias" towards women if you fit your model to the top 1% where women are better than men, in our hypothetical dataset.

This would result in "gender bias" in the results, but there's no statistical bias here, since your algorithm is correctly answering the question you asked. It's probably the wrong question though!

Figuring out if/when you're asking the right question is quite difficult, and as the sibling comment rightly pointed out, sometimes (e.g. insurance pricing) the strictly "correct" result (from a business/financial point of view) ends up being considered discriminatory under the moral lens.

This is why we can't just wash our hands of these problems and let a machine do it; until we're comfortable that machines understand our morality, they will do that part wrong.