Actually, we already knew about these correlations. It's not like the magic AI found that there's a statistical difference between races that we were unaware of. The difference is not that it's easy to blame prejudice on people and not AIs, the difference is that the people-based criteria were at least supposed to be designed to ignore race, while the AIs and their fanbois just treat the correlations as holy writ.
Are you trying to tell me that someone just like me but black would have a worse chance of paying off a loan? Or does it seem that people like me are more likely to occur with pale skins, at least heavily due to cultural influences? There's plenty of reasons in this society why a black guy would be likely to be worse with a loan than a white guy, and those reasons are what the model should be taking into account if it wants to be accurate. It may be harder to get these inputs than race, and so it's nice and easy to use race as a proxy, but it's illegal and unfair discrimination.
It's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or gender. We've decided that as a society, so that fewer people get bad treatment for things they can't change about themselves. (As a society, we usually treat religion as effectively unchangeable.) Further, it seems very unlikely that the differences attributed to race are actually a direct result of race, so you're using race as a proxy for other things, assuming, for example, that all blacks have certain (perhaps undefined) undesirable traits. If your model doesn't work if it doesn't take race into account, it doesn't model what really matters.
Forcing the residuals to randomness means that a guy just like me, only black, will get the same loan consideration as I do, which is what we want. If your model says I get more favorable consideration just because I'm white, your model is racist. It's unfair to the black guy otherwise like me, whether or not it has greater predictive value overall.
Sure, you should look at employment status. It's relevant. What would not be OK is to give unemployment status undue weight because it is different between races. It's becoming more important now since we're not designing the loan criteria ourselves, but are using powerful statistical techniques to come up with predictor functions, these aren't going to be perfect, and we can't reason about the functions. If the predictor function is biased against blacks in similar situations as whites, for example, that's illegal. One way to try to avoid that is to not include race as one of the inputs, but that isn't sufficient, since other inputs can function as proxies for race, particularly if the inputs aren't obviously indicative in themselves.
This is a complicated problem, and isn't going to have an easy or simple solution.
Speaking as someone who does know something about mathematics, statistics, and AI, I have FAR less faith than you do in the ability of the AI to magically come up with an accurate model. If we could enter every relevant variable, and the AI could know how each of these affects things, you'd have a much better argument.
We often can't come up with a score that works. If the score overestimates the likelihood for whites to pay their mortgage and underestimates the likelihood for blacks, then we'll get better overall results by favoring blacks. (Substitute protected group to taste; this is, as mathematicians say, without loss of generality.)
You're assuming that, in the absence of judicial bias, the children would be awarded equally to father and mother. I see no reason to think this is true. It might be true if society pushed fathers to have as much to do with their kids as mothers, or something like that, but it's entirely possible that it's to the child's interest for the mother to have custody in more or less than half the individual cases.
Ever hear of "overfitting"? If you feed a thousand input variables into an AI, and don't have an immense amount of learning data, the model will have a lot of accidental noise, such as figuring that left-handedmales in their thirties with BAs who earn $40K-$50K and live in owner-occupied houses in urban Alabama are very bad risks for no reason anyone can discern. As a general rule, if there's many more categories than lines of learning data, there's not going to be any constraint on how it evaluates a lot of situations.
Unfair discrimination has proven to be very stable. Something like sixty years ago, lots of establishments got more customers by excluding the black ones than they would have if they served blacks. Empirically, allowing people to discriminate at will causes more injustice than restricting some forms of discrimination.
We're not talking about lies here, we're talking about decisions about how to treat people. If the AI decides that women in general are too dangerous to lend to, the no woman will get a loan, no matter how reliable and deserving, and we consider that unacceptable. I don't know what you mean by micro vs. macro, since all an AI can do is apply rough categories and determine the likely characteristics of a group.
AIs do not currently have conscious or emotional biases. It is definitely possible for one to come up with an AI that has suboptimal calculations that wind up performing illegal discrimination, or just favoring one group over another with no basis.
The traditional definition of AI is the field that covers stuff we really don't know how to do. If we come up with an algorithm and apply it, it's not an AI. If it does its own learning, we're not going to be able to predict what it will come up with.
One of the most important things about a space program is cost per kilogram delivered to low Earth orbit, not what the biggest lift vehicle is. If Musk's plans work out, that cost is going to plummet. Get enough stuff into LEO and you can do anything.
This is actually a big minus for the Moon. Moon dust is very sharp and would be a big problem. Martian dust has been blown around a lot by what passes for an atmosphere over there, and the pieces of dust have knocked against each other enough to make it much smoother.
On Mars, we can land people at the surface. We can dig in. We can use the Martian soil and anything we can dig up for material. There's some hope that we could eventually have a self-sustaining colony, using Martian resources.
High in the atmosphere of Venus, we don't have that. We have what we can send to Venus from elsewhere. Getting anything useful from the surface of Venus is going to be far more difficult. We'll probably be able to do it sometime, but Mars is a much better prospect for a colony.
Yeah, I have vivid memories of expecting to be nuked for what at the time seemed like a long time.
To be fair, Reagan gets credit for the end of the Soviet Union without people seeming to notice how dangerous his strategy was. Gorbachev should get credit for allowing the Soviet Union fall apart more or less peacefully rather than attacking to try to hold the regime together.
That was then, this is now. It used to be that the press was happy to not talk about the less savory aspects of the President's life, and nowadays they like to find dirt. The press wasn't going to publicize Kennedy's highly dubious sex life.
Right, just like McGovern was not out of it forty-four years ago today. Trump won the Republican nomination with a hard core of supporters that were enough to win the primaries, but far from enough to win the general election. Since then, he's been doing an excellent job of alienating everyone outside that core, including the bulk of the Republican Party. Clinton has most of the Democratic Party with her, and has an effective campaign going. Trump is going to try to throw mud, but he's unlikely to find much of anything that hasn't been thrown at her already, while he seems able and willing to dig himself deeper and deeper.
The election is Clinton's to lose, and she's not going to let up or make big mistakes.
My take on it is that, since he's not going to be President much longer, and isn't going to accomplish much more working with Congress, Obama is trying to champion a cause to give it visibility.
I'm not understanding this. Currently, what's driving the cost to go to space down is private enterprise, particularly Space-X, finding less expensive ways to launch unmanned satellites. Sure, Musk really wants to colonize Mars, but he knows that lowering cost to orbit is not only lucrative but vital. I'd think that NASA advances in robotics are primarily from designed advanced robots for unmanned missions.
I'm not nearly as keen as some people here about manned Mars missions, although I agree it's a worthwhile long-term goal, but the scientific gains aren't what you say.
The Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate majority for a very short time in fact, since Franken was not seated until June or thereabouts and Kennedy died shortly thereafter. As far as getting it through, the Democrats are a much less organized party than the Republicans.
Obama tried to include the Republicans, who absolutely refused to deal to make the bill better. After the first two years, the Republicans stonewalled Obama, and refused to do anything to try to change the ACA for the better. Instead, they grandstanded by wasting a lot of time showboating repeals that they knew would be vetoed, which wasn't particularly responsible of them.
The fact is that the ACA has been something of a success, which you wouldn't realize by listening to Republican propaganda.
I'm allowed to elect my two Senators, my Representative, my state Senator and Representative, county commissioners, and my City Council member, as far as the legislative branch goes. I'm allowed to elect my President, my Governor, and my Mayor for the executive branch. I can vote for everyone who makes laws and everyone with executive authority that affects me at home. There's some dilution involved, in that I have to share this electoral power with something like a couple hundred million other people on the electoral rolls, but that's true for everyone (although to a greater or lesser extent).
If you're complaining about who appears on the November ballots, well, you need to get involved with the party of your choice to affect that, or perhaps contribute to or campaign for who you like. I haven't heard of a party turning away volunteers (if the party makes you uncomfortable you might not have chosen wisely), and those who do work get some more say in what happens.
The Soviet Union never practiced the "to each according to their needs" part, and so wasn't doing true Marxist Communism. The excuse was that they were working towards it. The idealism behind Communism (and some other utopias) is that everyone really wants to contribute what they can, whereas in fact most people would be satisfied to sit on their asses and watch television. Communism could be successful and beautiful, but we're going to have to find the right intelligent species for it, because Homo Sapiens sure ani't it.
Communism seems to work reasonably well in rare cases on a scale no larger than a small town, for maybe a generation, with a charismatic leader pushing it. Aside from that, economic systems that want to get work done reward it.
Suppose that I put something on a review site about you that you don't like. You bring action against George over there, who says he put it on the site, he's sorry, and he'll agree to a settlement that involves a court order to remove the review. Everybody knows where to find you, me, and the review site, although in the examples apparently George frequently has a phony address, and the court doesn't know that I should be involved. It's risky for the lawyers involved, who face serious danger of sanctions or disbarring, and apparently this is gotten around by having people file suits for themselves without admitting that they get legal help.
Under the circumstances, I don't think Google has any duty to tell microsoft.com what's happening. (I'm not a lawyer, which may be painfully obvious to people who are.) Google probably isn't particularly hurt by this, and likely doesn't have standing to sue. Microsoft likely is hurt, and has standing (at least in the form of a libel suit), and this is probably a crime, which means that a prosecutor could bring this into a criminal court, although prosecutors tend not to do this.
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Actually, we already knew about these correlations. It's not like the magic AI found that there's a statistical difference between races that we were unaware of. The difference is not that it's easy to blame prejudice on people and not AIs, the difference is that the people-based criteria were at least supposed to be designed to ignore race, while the AIs and their fanbois just treat the correlations as holy writ.
Are you trying to tell me that someone just like me but black would have a worse chance of paying off a loan? Or does it seem that people like me are more likely to occur with pale skins, at least heavily due to cultural influences? There's plenty of reasons in this society why a black guy would be likely to be worse with a loan than a white guy, and those reasons are what the model should be taking into account if it wants to be accurate. It may be harder to get these inputs than race, and so it's nice and easy to use race as a proxy, but it's illegal and unfair discrimination.
It's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or gender. We've decided that as a society, so that fewer people get bad treatment for things they can't change about themselves. (As a society, we usually treat religion as effectively unchangeable.) Further, it seems very unlikely that the differences attributed to race are actually a direct result of race, so you're using race as a proxy for other things, assuming, for example, that all blacks have certain (perhaps undefined) undesirable traits. If your model doesn't work if it doesn't take race into account, it doesn't model what really matters.
Forcing the residuals to randomness means that a guy just like me, only black, will get the same loan consideration as I do, which is what we want. If your model says I get more favorable consideration just because I'm white, your model is racist. It's unfair to the black guy otherwise like me, whether or not it has greater predictive value overall.
Sure, you should look at employment status. It's relevant. What would not be OK is to give unemployment status undue weight because it is different between races. It's becoming more important now since we're not designing the loan criteria ourselves, but are using powerful statistical techniques to come up with predictor functions, these aren't going to be perfect, and we can't reason about the functions. If the predictor function is biased against blacks in similar situations as whites, for example, that's illegal. One way to try to avoid that is to not include race as one of the inputs, but that isn't sufficient, since other inputs can function as proxies for race, particularly if the inputs aren't obviously indicative in themselves.
This is a complicated problem, and isn't going to have an easy or simple solution.
Speaking as someone who does know something about mathematics, statistics, and AI, I have FAR less faith than you do in the ability of the AI to magically come up with an accurate model. If we could enter every relevant variable, and the AI could know how each of these affects things, you'd have a much better argument.
We often can't come up with a score that works. If the score overestimates the likelihood for whites to pay their mortgage and underestimates the likelihood for blacks, then we'll get better overall results by favoring blacks. (Substitute protected group to taste; this is, as mathematicians say, without loss of generality.)
You're assuming that, in the absence of judicial bias, the children would be awarded equally to father and mother. I see no reason to think this is true. It might be true if society pushed fathers to have as much to do with their kids as mothers, or something like that, but it's entirely possible that it's to the child's interest for the mother to have custody in more or less than half the individual cases.
Ever hear of "overfitting"? If you feed a thousand input variables into an AI, and don't have an immense amount of learning data, the model will have a lot of accidental noise, such as figuring that left-handedmales in their thirties with BAs who earn $40K-$50K and live in owner-occupied houses in urban Alabama are very bad risks for no reason anyone can discern. As a general rule, if there's many more categories than lines of learning data, there's not going to be any constraint on how it evaluates a lot of situations.
Unfair discrimination has proven to be very stable. Something like sixty years ago, lots of establishments got more customers by excluding the black ones than they would have if they served blacks. Empirically, allowing people to discriminate at will causes more injustice than restricting some forms of discrimination.
We're not talking about lies here, we're talking about decisions about how to treat people. If the AI decides that women in general are too dangerous to lend to, the no woman will get a loan, no matter how reliable and deserving, and we consider that unacceptable. I don't know what you mean by micro vs. macro, since all an AI can do is apply rough categories and determine the likely characteristics of a group.
AIs do not currently have conscious or emotional biases. It is definitely possible for one to come up with an AI that has suboptimal calculations that wind up performing illegal discrimination, or just favoring one group over another with no basis.
The traditional definition of AI is the field that covers stuff we really don't know how to do. If we come up with an algorithm and apply it, it's not an AI. If it does its own learning, we're not going to be able to predict what it will come up with.
One of the most important things about a space program is cost per kilogram delivered to low Earth orbit, not what the biggest lift vehicle is. If Musk's plans work out, that cost is going to plummet. Get enough stuff into LEO and you can do anything.
This is actually a big minus for the Moon. Moon dust is very sharp and would be a big problem. Martian dust has been blown around a lot by what passes for an atmosphere over there, and the pieces of dust have knocked against each other enough to make it much smoother.
On Mars, we can land people at the surface. We can dig in. We can use the Martian soil and anything we can dig up for material. There's some hope that we could eventually have a self-sustaining colony, using Martian resources.
High in the atmosphere of Venus, we don't have that. We have what we can send to Venus from elsewhere. Getting anything useful from the surface of Venus is going to be far more difficult. We'll probably be able to do it sometime, but Mars is a much better prospect for a colony.
Yeah, I have vivid memories of expecting to be nuked for what at the time seemed like a long time.
To be fair, Reagan gets credit for the end of the Soviet Union without people seeming to notice how dangerous his strategy was. Gorbachev should get credit for allowing the Soviet Union fall apart more or less peacefully rather than attacking to try to hold the regime together.
That was then, this is now. It used to be that the press was happy to not talk about the less savory aspects of the President's life, and nowadays they like to find dirt. The press wasn't going to publicize Kennedy's highly dubious sex life.
Right, just like McGovern was not out of it forty-four years ago today. Trump won the Republican nomination with a hard core of supporters that were enough to win the primaries, but far from enough to win the general election. Since then, he's been doing an excellent job of alienating everyone outside that core, including the bulk of the Republican Party. Clinton has most of the Democratic Party with her, and has an effective campaign going. Trump is going to try to throw mud, but he's unlikely to find much of anything that hasn't been thrown at her already, while he seems able and willing to dig himself deeper and deeper.
The election is Clinton's to lose, and she's not going to let up or make big mistakes.
He was busy with the ACA in 2009.
My take on it is that, since he's not going to be President much longer, and isn't going to accomplish much more working with Congress, Obama is trying to champion a cause to give it visibility.
I'm not understanding this. Currently, what's driving the cost to go to space down is private enterprise, particularly Space-X, finding less expensive ways to launch unmanned satellites. Sure, Musk really wants to colonize Mars, but he knows that lowering cost to orbit is not only lucrative but vital. I'd think that NASA advances in robotics are primarily from designed advanced robots for unmanned missions.
I'm not nearly as keen as some people here about manned Mars missions, although I agree it's a worthwhile long-term goal, but the scientific gains aren't what you say.
The Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate majority for a very short time in fact, since Franken was not seated until June or thereabouts and Kennedy died shortly thereafter. As far as getting it through, the Democrats are a much less organized party than the Republicans.
Obama tried to include the Republicans, who absolutely refused to deal to make the bill better. After the first two years, the Republicans stonewalled Obama, and refused to do anything to try to change the ACA for the better. Instead, they grandstanded by wasting a lot of time showboating repeals that they knew would be vetoed, which wasn't particularly responsible of them.
The fact is that the ACA has been something of a success, which you wouldn't realize by listening to Republican propaganda.
I'm allowed to elect my two Senators, my Representative, my state Senator and Representative, county commissioners, and my City Council member, as far as the legislative branch goes. I'm allowed to elect my President, my Governor, and my Mayor for the executive branch. I can vote for everyone who makes laws and everyone with executive authority that affects me at home. There's some dilution involved, in that I have to share this electoral power with something like a couple hundred million other people on the electoral rolls, but that's true for everyone (although to a greater or lesser extent).
If you're complaining about who appears on the November ballots, well, you need to get involved with the party of your choice to affect that, or perhaps contribute to or campaign for who you like. I haven't heard of a party turning away volunteers (if the party makes you uncomfortable you might not have chosen wisely), and those who do work get some more say in what happens.
The Soviet Union never practiced the "to each according to their needs" part, and so wasn't doing true Marxist Communism. The excuse was that they were working towards it. The idealism behind Communism (and some other utopias) is that everyone really wants to contribute what they can, whereas in fact most people would be satisfied to sit on their asses and watch television. Communism could be successful and beautiful, but we're going to have to find the right intelligent species for it, because Homo Sapiens sure ani't it.
Communism seems to work reasonably well in rare cases on a scale no larger than a small town, for maybe a generation, with a charismatic leader pushing it. Aside from that, economic systems that want to get work done reward it.
Except that the DNS is irrelevant.
Suppose that I put something on a review site about you that you don't like. You bring action against George over there, who says he put it on the site, he's sorry, and he'll agree to a settlement that involves a court order to remove the review. Everybody knows where to find you, me, and the review site, although in the examples apparently George frequently has a phony address, and the court doesn't know that I should be involved. It's risky for the lawyers involved, who face serious danger of sanctions or disbarring, and apparently this is gotten around by having people file suits for themselves without admitting that they get legal help.
Probably not jail, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the lawyers sanctioned. The court can't dish out criminal penalties in a civil case.
The really hard part, of course, is knowing that this is going on in time to file a brief.
From what I understand, perjury in civil cases is rarely prosecuted. I don't know why, but it seems to me that prosecuting it would be a good idea.
Under the circumstances, I don't think Google has any duty to tell microsoft.com what's happening. (I'm not a lawyer, which may be painfully obvious to people who are.) Google probably isn't particularly hurt by this, and likely doesn't have standing to sue. Microsoft likely is hurt, and has standing (at least in the form of a libel suit), and this is probably a crime, which means that a prosecutor could bring this into a criminal court, although prosecutors tend not to do this.