Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TrackerFF 909 days ago
if (booking.customer.age <= 25) and (booking.date.between("27-12-2023","02-01-2024")):

booking.decline(show_random_error=True)

else:

booking.confirm()

1 comments

Yes but with AI so they can pretend it's not age-based discrimination. “we're not discriminating, maybe the computer is, we'll investigate”
Is it discrimination if it is rooted in an objectively good reason? You also can't rent a car in a lot of places until you are 25.
Yes. It may be legal discrimination, though.

In the US, Federal law makes age discrimination illegal only if the victim is over 40.

I guess if you follow a rule-based system, with hard-coded rules, you are explicitly discriminating someone. How you came up with those rules, is another discussion - it could very well be that there's some legit reason for coming up with rules, that justifies them. I honestly don't know how these discrimination laws work in the US, or many other countries.

On the other hand, if you build some model/classifier, and say:

Given data/features, and some constraints, minimize/maximize for probability of partying.

Then that black-box model could be used to classify whether a potential renter is likely/at risk to host a party or not.

You're not explicitly saying "NO PEOPLE OF CERTAIN SKIN COLOR OR GENDER UNDER A CERTAIN AGE ALOWED", but rather your classifier is doing it for you, without stating it plainly - because maybe the above group happens to get classified a lot to the "party" group/class. Such models could have a lot of bias.