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NYC Announces Plans To Test Algorithms For Bias (betanews.com)
The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has announced the formation of a new task force to examine the fairness of the algorithms used in the city's automated systems. From a report: The Automated Decision Systems Task Force will review algorithms that are in use to determine that they are free from bias. Representatives from the Department of Social Services, the NYC Police Department, the Department of Transportation, the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, the Administration for Children's Services, and the Department of Education will be involved, and the aim is to produce a report by December 2019. However, it may be some time before the task force has any sort of effect. While a report is planned for the end of next year, it will merely recommend "procedures for reviewing and assessing City algorithmic tools to ensure equity and opportunity" -- it will be a while before any recommendation might be assessed and implemented.
Against AC's getting first posts. Just look at how I'm modded down!
...that happens to be correct, do they throw the whole thing out to spare everyone's feelings?
So by "fair" they mean "unfair" ... since we can't have a mere algorithm making decisions based on silly facts and stuff. It might not produce the "right" outcomes.
If they want precrime algorithms and AI to ensure no one is smoking or drinking sugary beverages then more power to them, as long as they keep their technocratic dystopia confined to NYC they can do whatever they want.
"Well, the legislature, governor, and city council have to go..."
"Yes. Wait, we haven't even started yet!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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Further example of mental ilness in high places.
...Affirmative Algorithms.
Put in a mandate that all government algorithms most be open sourced in an easily accessible fashion, and all data passed through them must also be easily accessed. This will enable 3rd parties, ANY 3rd party, not just contracted "companies" (usually in the pockets of the people making decisions) to audit the code and data for flaws.
One of the largest issues I've seen in the past with these systems is that they falsely assume correlation = causation. And quite often, the cause and effect are backwards, too. One example I always liked was that "overhead high voltage power lines caused health issues for those that live near them" - when once the data was updated with more inputs, it was discovered that it was an entirely different cause all together. High voltage power lines are unsightly, causing housing values around them to be below the average for the community. Poorer families were buying/renting them. Poorer families are more likely to have health issues due to financial constraints. In the end, the correlation wasn't causation, but each item both shared a similar root cause.
A potentially bias algorithm that test bias algorithm. I wonder.
A plan to have police respond to an area that has a high crime rate around 3 pm seems reasonable and in a way race is not involved. Gut the effect of such a plan is very racist in its consequences. Poor people do drug deals and prostitute on the side walks and they are easily caught so the area gets a high crime rate designation. Rich people frequently commit far greater crimes but it takes place behind mansion walls and usually goes unnoticed. On top of that the cops know that a bust on a rich person will result in expensive lawyers fighting for the guilty party whereas the poor get minimal legal help and no funding at all for investigations. often in a given area poverty and race are highly related so for a cop his promotions are much more likely to occur when he arrests poor people. So the effect of a seemingly innocent program can in its effect be severely racist. On top of that our legal system actually creates crimes. for example a burglar gets caught and needs a top notch lawyer. in his head it hits him that he will need to commit several crimes to pay for the lawyer so while he is out on bail he is breaking into more homes and businesses. Both our civil and criminal laws need a total new way of dealing with problems and the laws we have now belong in a trash basket.
The algorithms deal only in facts and data. Even if they WERE presenting biased results, there is not one human alive, not me, not you, not the almighty assholes in government, nobody, that can assess that bias fairly without throwing their own biases on top of the algorithm for comparison.
You need an algorithm to check the algorithms, but then you're right back to wondering where the bias comes from, the algorithm, or the creator of the algorithm.
And if this is literally just another chance to shove political correctness into result sets, then fuck the whole process. Stop trying to pretty up how ugly our motivations are.
Great, I'm sure there weren't other uses for a couple of six-figure salaries and all their staff for an indeterminable amount of time to learn if algorithms are racist.
This algorithm is hereby rejected. It shows an unfair bias toward the number 1, which appears twice as many times in the results as any other number!
It's the typical response you get from liberals when you point out that their reasoning doesn't match the world: reality is racist.
Try and bring crime statistics or other facts into a discussion about how weird it is that the areas with the most liberal voters are also the ones that, strangely, have the most crime, or that weirdly statistics proves that it's not racism, immigrants really do bring crime with them - and they'll just reply that "reality is racist."
This is the same thing. Of course the computer doesn't have any biases. It's a computer. It looks at data and computers results. You can't get any more unbiased than raw data. But it doesn't matter: "reality is racist" and we have to compensate...
Opportunity is created or denied by political will, not by algorithmic tools. Its what you do with the hammer that counts. For every nail, there is a mallet that is leverageable with equity. A counting hammer would be cool, though.
One problem I have about political use of the term "bias" versus the scientific use is that when policymakers (under public pressure) find that otherwise unbiased selectors or factors that produce groups or divisions of the population that are "biased", they feel that the algorithms are "wrong" or need to be fixed.
I happen to also be quite skeptical of the legitimacy of disparate impact policy, which states that even if a policy is facially neutral (not imposing rules or criteria associated with protected classes attributes), if it affects one group more than another it may be considered discriminatory or "biased".
While good in theory, I have real trouble about how "unbiased" principles are applied in practice.
People decide what variables to put in or not, what data to test on or not. Using an "algorithm" doesn't eliminate subjectivity, it removes it in the sense of setting it at a distance where it is out of people's minds even though it's still there.
is a complete joke as a public servant. Is there any limit to the ways he and his administration can come up with to waste tax dollars..
;)
Just my 2 cents
Based on what I've seen in recent years, a "racist" or "biased" output will be deemed to be any that results in a protected group being disproportionately represented, either too highly or too little depending on which outcome hurts it. No matter that, for example, a higher-than-normal rejection rate for loans for a group doesn't result in a lower-than-normal default rate on those loans (meaning the rejection were reasonable, not biased), it will be, definitionally, evidence of discrimination.
Is the person poor? Generational poverty? No job? Living in an area with an above average crime rate?
Who is committing the crime? What crimes? What policing method has best reduced that crime rate around the USA?
Make some maps of the city and fund some new police in the areas with crime.
Add some CCTV. Bring in the next gen IMSI-catchers to see who is talking with criminals. A better voice print system?
Start tracking crime down to a street and building level in real time.
Ask the FBI to provide some statistics on who is doing what crime, when and where. Find the predicable patterns for the police to work with.
Todays tech can map most of the problem areas and detect most of the repeat criminals.
The only bias is not funding the police to do their jobs. Stop looking for "bias" and start funding police work.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That is the whole damn point and only function of a neural net, including any brain's!
It groups input into patterns/memes, based on previous incomplete input (aka "prejudice"). All we do is act "prejudiced" based on anecdotal evidence all day long!
That does not imply hate!
Implying that it implies hate, *is* hateful though. At least fromy POV.
And my POV is all I have.
I can never know any absolute reality.
When people act like something is an absolute / unbiased view, all they mean is that it fits their own bias. Be it their personal one, or the one of the social group or swarm lifeform they are part of.
Conclusion: NYC wants to force everyone into their personal mold of thinking, and ne a good goose-stepping conformist. Be it SJW or Neocon or whatever cancer. I'm from a distant land. I don't know the local ruling mindset.
because racism is pretty rampant here in the US still. The best example is when zip codes are used to make decisions. For example, you want to advertise your public Universities to encourage the best students to go to them. So you do a bunch of surveys and find which schools have the best students. Decades of institutional racism means those neighborhoods have higher percentages of white students than minorities. Here "institutional racism" means things like blacks being less likely to get loans, being turned down for jobs and promotions, getting arrested for a gram of weed, etc, etc.
Racism in America didn't go away just because we made it illegal any more than banning drugs did. The difference is there's a good case to be made for legalizing drugs. I can't think of any good reason to legalize racism.
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There's this. That doesn't seem very fair to me. Every bit of data fed into that algorithm was a fact though. Now, if some of those facts were choose... shall we say "selectively", well, that's fair. It's a free country right? Right?
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Now I have an excellent example to show around when someone asks me what "whataboutism" means. Thanks!
A biased city is going to decide who and what is biased?
That's like the pot calling the kettle black.
Def: "Biased algorithm": Did not provide the results we wanted.
"a higher-than-normal rejection rate for loans for a group doesn't result in a lower-than-normal default rate on those loans"
If the higher-than-normal rejection rate is correct, it SHOULD lead to a "normal" default rate on loans for that group, not significantly more (too lenient) nor significantly lower (too stringent). Managing risks is the whole point and the risk involved should be at a base level for whatever group you look at.
For those that still don't get it, and say "oh well, the lender should just accept the higher losses for those groups" as the price for Looking Decent in the Eyes of the Public, think again. They're not going to absorb that, it's just coming out of the pockets of their other customers. So they'll increase your rate by 0.5% to offset the "Decency Tax".
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.