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Comment by mrcactu5 | Hacker News Reader

Machine Learning Algorithms are severely racist towards defendants. We know, for example, that AI algorithms mistake Black people for primates... but they are no more racist than the criminal justice system at large. And they have a better chance of getting fixed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial...

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Why is it that the vast majority of the time I see "We know[, for example,]" at the start of a sentence, the text following is one or more of:

1. A blatant lie

2. A willful misinterpretation of new research

3. A gross misunderstanding of research outside one's area of expertise

4. A misapplication of one thing for another, e.g. conflating webcam algorithms and all their issues with criminal justice algorithms

I find it more disturbing that AI algorithms don't think that non-black people are primates, as I can assure you they are.

Bond is severely racist too, if you take those criteria. Black people get assigned higher bond, and often have a harder time getting it together. As such there are many people in jail that are in no way a risk but are held because they can't afford bond.

From this perspective, bond-based pretrial detention is actually better -- communities can organize bail funds to reduce its impact. You can't really fight algorithmic detention in the same way.

Our awareness that machine learning algorithms have the potential to make racist decisions gives us something to watch out for as these systems roll out. Hopefully addressing any flaws will be a matter of ordinary debugging.

Regardless, the cash bail system is terrible and I'm anticipating big improvements as we move away from it.

New Jersey's system has proven to be remarkably fair. It turns out when you design the system specifically not to be racist, it isn't racist.

Also, I'm not sure how misidentification of pictures relates to the topic at hand.

> It turns out when you design the system specifically not to be racist, it isn't racist.

This is key, New Jersey went out of it's wait to avoid using anything that could be a proxy for race like zip codes. They also used big data to come up with the algorithm, the algorithm itself[1] is pretty strait forward and is not a black box.

The fear in California is that some counties will use black box ML systems that WILL have bias even if it's not intentional, just like how biases in the training data of image recognition tend to misidentify pictures of black people more then white people.

1. https://www.arnoldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/PSA-Risk...

Wow citation needed, and a nyt opinion piece is not research proving your claim.

"Algorithms are racist" ha!

Here's a few,

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607955/inspecting-algorit...

http://fortune.com/longform/ai-bias-problem/

https://www.pcmag.com/article/361661/artificial-intelligence...

Ethics and Bias in Machine Learning: A Technical Study of What Makes Us “Good” https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Man - to hell with this forum, I ask for evidence on a claim that other posters have pointed out is a misapplication of other research 'webscam algos != cash bail algos'

And I get downvoted!?

This is tech news, something the general public can get easily manipulated into...and for demanding a degree of reasonable discourse and reference, i get downvoted?

Bleh, this place is turning into a place i cant speak relatively freely in.

I doubt it was your request for evidence that got you downvoted, it was the way you phrased both the request and the follow-up comment.

Try a more polite tone and you may get better results.

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