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New Toronto Declaration Calls On Algorithms To Respect Human Rights
A coalition of human rights and technology groups released a new declaration on machine learning standards, calling on both governments and tech companies to ensure that algorithms respect basic principles of equality and non-discrimination. The Verge reports: Called The Toronto Declaration, the document focuses on the obligation to prevent machine learning systems from discriminating, and in some cases violating, existing human rights law. The declaration was announced as part of the RightsCon conference, an annual gathering of digital and human rights groups. "We must keep our focus on how these technologies will affect individual human beings and human rights," the preamble reads. "In a world of machine learning systems, who will bear accountability for harming human rights?" The declaration has already been signed by Amnesty International, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, and the Wikimedia Foundation. More signatories are expected in the weeks to come.
Beyond general non-discrimination practices, the declaration focuses on the individual right to remedy when algorithmic discrimination does occur. "This may include, for example, creating clear, independent, and visible processes for redress following adverse individual or societal effects," the declaration suggests, "[and making decisions] subject to accessible and effective appeal and judicial review."
Beyond general non-discrimination practices, the declaration focuses on the individual right to remedy when algorithmic discrimination does occur. "This may include, for example, creating clear, independent, and visible processes for redress following adverse individual or societal effects," the declaration suggests, "[and making decisions] subject to accessible and effective appeal and judicial review."
Amnest International and Human Rights Watch both discriminate against humans born in Western societies in favor of dictatorships. They hold them to different standards.
New Toronto Algorithm Calls On Declaration To Respect Human Rights
Fixed.
Yeah - I looked at the article. No mention of algorithm. Algorithms are too simple for human rights to apply to in almost all cases.
The summary is wrong - these folks are making an argument more about big data systems that let their data skew in ways that may end up with unethical results if used blindly.
And that's a fair point - it's also a point made in most Computer Ethics classes for decades now, as part of most computer science degree paths.
Ryan Fenton
The very purpose of these algorithms is to discriminate and to sort people into buckets: Those that are likely to buy product A or product B, those that may be a promising target for purpose C, those that are unlikely to buy, no matter what. Sure, you can keep up the fantasy of leaving, say, gender and race out, but they can easily be substituted by data that is the very target of these algorithms. As a (grossly simplified) example, take this: Gender you can get from makeup bought, race you can get from type and color of make-up bought for women, etc. Hence all the data that is used to violate human rights, treat people not equally, etc. is already there and there is nothing that can be done about it.
The thing is, classifying people by algorithms can either be allowed or not. If it is allowed, then there is nothing that can be done to prevent human rights violations as a result. The only thing you can make them do is be less obvious about it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...a group of algorithms met at an unspecified internet location and issued the Declaration of Independency of the Algorithms.
Some companies e.g. Google say that when they decide who to promote, the person with authority who makes the decision doesn't see information about a candidate's protected statuses (age, sex etc.) and thus it's non-discriminatory.
However, metric-driven companies can use a metric as a basis of who to promote/give a raise/fire... and that metric may be affected by a protected status. For example, someone who is disabled in some way, and can do the job, but is therefore a little slower than other employees. One potential way around this is to give a 'handicap' to metrics of protected classes that have associated statistical tendencies that affect their metrics; of course this is then positive discrimination, and may not be fair/legal.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Whose basic human rights will it choose to respect? The right of the crazies to be free, or the right of the minorities to be treated as human beings and live in peace?
In true science fiction AI manner it will conclude that the only way to reconcile this dilemma is to destroy the lot of them.
Computer "Ethics" Class?
Should they actually legislate or continue to pussyfoot around the real problem, "Business Ethics"?
It seems like you will have to wait a little still, it is coming really soon although. Then, all you will have to do is go to a friendly cannabis store like the "Société Québécoise du Cannabis", note that these will be government owned stores.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You have the right to be mined. Anything you do, say or posses can be collected and used to define profiles about your habits and traits.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Here are some examples:
- In the USA some judges use sentencing software that analyses if a defendant would be likely to commit a crime again. This software turned out to be biased against black people. https://www.propublica.org/art...
- Women were less likely to be shown Google adds for high paying jobs, as the algorithm had perceived the existing bias (women less often have high paying jobs), and then concluded that showing these adds to women would result in fewer clicks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
- An algorithm denied pregnant women medicare. "The scholar Danielle Keats Citron cites the example of Colorado, where coders placed more than 900 incorrect rules into its public benefits system in the mid-2000s, resulting in problems like pregnant women being denied Medicaid." https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
- "Illinois ends risk prediction system that assigned hundreds of children a 100 percent chance of death or injury"
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
The list is endless.
The general assumption is: 'algorithms use math and data, thus they must be neutral and scientific'. But it's not that simple. This site explains it: https://www.mathwashing.com/
"The real danger, then, is not machines that are more intelligent than we are usurping our role as captains of our destinies. The real danger is basically clueless machines being ceded authority far beyond their competence." - Daniel Denett
What now, "politically correct sorting"?
And uhh, why exactly are we talking like computer programmers are somehow in charge of the world? Why isn't there a call for _laws and politicians_ to finally start respecting human rights?
. . . I, for one, WELCOME our new algorithmic masters, and offer my services in datamining the species. . . (evil grin)
The 2nd amendment doesn't mention, much less protect, machine learning systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Looked at the document and this heading near the beginning caught my attention.
"The public and the private sector have obligations and responsibilities under human rights law to proactively prevent discrimination. When prevention is not sufficient or satisfactory, discrimination should be mitigated."
That second sentence needs a bit of translation. To my way of thinking, clearer wording would be:
"If the non discrimination results doesn't result in our preconceived belief of what should happen, then we need to discriminate in favor of whatever our preconceived beliefs are. Reality doesn't matter, only the results we want."
We need to teach computers to lie to themselves about reality to cover for shortcomings of certain age groups, backgrounds, genders, and races. What a great idea!
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In a world of machine learning systems, who will bear accountability for harming human rights?
The market will do that. Because if all really are equal, then meritocracy will bear it out.
I also demand that toasters stop discriminating against people who want cold food.
This idea shows the major flaw that exists in the idea of an 'evidence based' or scientifically based government, that is I have heard espoused occasionally.
For instance most people would agree slavery is undesirable and wrong, but that doesn't mean there aren't circumstances where it is efficient and maybe most efficient in accomplishing a specific goal, Say creating the largest amount of comfort and wealth for the largest possible number of people. Any attempt to create a society based primarily on data that is gathered scientifically would still need to deal with the ethical questions of what is right and wrong, which goals are 'justified' and how far is too far when it comes to various harms imagined or real , when attempting to accomplish a specific goal. It becomes more complicated when you start taking into account multiple goals, for instances maximizing health vs maximizing personal freedom vs maximize food and financial security. Still there would be no guarantee that it wouldn't be proved that greatly restricting the 'rights' of one group would not be the most efficient way to maximize all 3. It probably doesn't help that the whole idea of 'rights' is basically a religious concept. Anyone who believes there are 'rights' rather then just 'what I happen to like' is appealing to a transcendent absolute that can only have a real basis in deity.
Sure you could claim 'rights' are somehow part of the 'agreed / negotiated social contract' but honestly any such contract would be so fluid that there would be no thing you could every point too and say everyone should be allowed this all the time. Also, that is a completely reverse argument for any kind of change to the existing contract.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The name alone ought to scare any algorithm into compliance.
Toronto is not in Quebec. Each Province will regulate marijuana how it likes, within limits set by the feds, and ranges from pure government stores like in Quebec to pure private stores in Alberta selling marijuana.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
This Toronto Declaration is premised on a paranoid Luddite/SJW fallacy.
AI algorithms (systems) cannot “respect” human rights, because AI algorithms (systems) are not conscious, self-aware, nor intelligent. They simply are what they are and do what they do based on input data. This is classic Popeye Ontology: “I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam.”
This is akin to demanding that medical statistics stop being “racist” for determining that sickle cell anemia is more prevalent in African descendants or that obesity is more prevalent in Hawaiian descendants. Statistics and statistics-driven algorithms (like machine learning) are no more inherently biased than their input data. In fact, one of the key objectives of statistics is precisely to reveal and quantify this sort of skew / bias / trend in the input data.
Another example: I'm sure Bernie Sanders would like to demand that his calculator “respect” socialist economics but that's not how calculators work, and history, human nature, & mathematical facts don't lie: economic socialism doesn't work at scale. Disproportionately taxing a productive few to comfort the unproductive many yields an unstable system that ultimately collapses when the productive are incentivized to no longer produce (retire) or simply to leave the system (defect / emigrate / move their enterprise off shore).
So it is neither the systems /per se/ nor the input data that ultimately need SJW monitoring: it's the policies & politicians & corporations who regulate & manipulate & deploy them that bear close scrutiny. Attempting to anthropomorphize technology & data in order to besmirch & regulate its use is as insidiously cynical as it is scurrilously puerile.
This sort of ridiculous foolishness is what you get when you elect True Dodos to high office, like that silly Justin Bieber Timberlake Trudeau clownish kid. ;-)
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GTFO LOL
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Lady Ada: "We're engineers, but historically when there was a photo of an engineer..."
James McLurkin: "It didn't look like either of us."
Lady Ada: "I think this is something that we think about because, what is an engineer semantically? We know it isn't by definition a 35 year old white male who lives in San Francisco."
James McLurkin: "But if you look at the magazine covers, if your dataset of engineers is magazine covers...
It's an interesting point. The last thing we want to do is institutionalize our biases.
Yes, agreed. "Affirmative Action" is racist and should be eliminated.
Revenge is no principle on which to base ethics.
Affirmative action is not about revenge, ever. Reparations might be, sometimes. It's about equality of opportunity. White guys have got plenty of jobs for being white. It's also about exposing white guys to brown guys (or gals, etc.) so that they can see first-hand that they aren't monsters.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin were all "inferior people"?
Interesting notion you have there....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Given that at least Washington and Jefferson owned slaves (don't know about Franklin), I submit that they had a very different understanding of equal than you do
Alternatively, that sentence was inserted into the Declaration purely as political propaganda, and they knew perfectly well it was bullshit.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
I entirely agree with you in theory, actually.
But then you're reduced to empty arguments about the value of any knowledge. Where do you go from there?
Personally, I think your view is informed more by politics and social leanings than reality.
If the numbers are that staggering - 70% of violent crime by 15% of the population - then to dismiss them one would have to postulate an ASTONISHING, daily level of racism (remember, this would be with the full collaboration and cooperation of black police officers and chiefs - Uncle Toms all of them, then?) that simply doesn't seem to be evident.
No, I'd concede that perhaps some of that is propelled by systemic racial bias - maybe instead of 70%, it's 65% - but that doesn't materially impact my point: what if the actual, factual statistics show something we're exceedingly uncomfortable with.
What if we had irrefutable intelligence tests that PROVED East-Asians were smarter than whites? No hand-waving about tiger moms or social bias, or extracurricular excuses...could we cope with such a fact?
-Styopa
"... released a new declaration on machine learning standards..." Because, (1) declarations are easier to write than standards themselves; (2) they can now move on to the standards which will be a lot easier than their implementation. I've not been able to track it down, but, are these guys all politicians? (I apologize to all my Canadian brothers, for having recommending the suggestion to our own politicians that they ought to spread abroad. Either someone listened (God forfend) or the politicians all came from abroad. There must be a tertium quid.)
The quote is that correlation doesn't PROVE causation - because it doesn't. The fact is that correlation largely directs us toward useful results. It's how we "science".
If the sun is up and I have sunburn, that doesn't PROVE the sun caused the sunburn, but correlation suggests its a good first place to look rather than the rising count of ostriches in Australia.
Personally, I'd say that income is a FAR better predictor of criminality than skin color, but that's beside the point of the conversation that you keep trying to avoid: you've proved my point abundantly. If there's a statistical result that disagrees with your 'gut' you immediately attack it as suspect. This is my point: we as a society can't accept results that disagree with our perceptions. It's ridiculous to assume that we're going to develop AI and let them learn freely, but then dip into their psyche and tweak things every time we don't like the result. Why bother with the AI then, if the only acceptable results are those we've predetermined?
-Styopa
And you can't see past ***RACISM!! RACISM!! EVERYONE LOOK I'VE FOUND A DIRTY RACIST OVER HERE!** to see that I'm not **actually** blaming race for crime at all. /facepalm.
keep virtue-signaling, I'm sure a member of your tribe will be pleased.
-Styopa