MIT, Harvard scientists find AI recognizes race from X-rays and nobody knows how | Hacker News Reader

MIT, Harvard scientists find AI recognizes race from X-rays and nobody knows how

bostonglobe.com

It's twigging to differences in the input data. Whether it's how the forehead is arranged, the chin, eye sockets, cheekbones, ... There is something or a set of something that is correlated with race that's being picked up. If it's whole body, maybe it's height, leg length/pattern, whatever.

Not to be missed, though, is the issue of explainability in machine learning.

Explainable AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelli...

Edit: Coincidentally, someone just posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31390564 - "Breaking into the black box of artificial intelligence (nature.com)".

Why would anyone be surprised? There are at least as many things to “see” below the skin as at the surface.

Likely due to all the "race is skin deep and/or a social construct" rhetoric.

Human "race" is, because all human populations can reproduce with one another.

Race is a poor descriptor for geographic ancestry. Lumping people who don't share geographic ancestors together by phenotype is the greatest form of "race mixing" a society can do.

> Human "race" is, because all human populations can reproduce with one another.

You're thinking of "species".

Human "race" is [false] is what I'd hoped to imply.

"Race" was misapplied to humans before the discovery of genes and is a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-scientific excuse to authoritatively classify and separate people based only on shallow, false differences. It is eugenic in purpose.

Belief in blood purity is an old religion, and Jefferson cited that it took a fixed number of generations for the "blood to clear" after what some today would call "race mixing". Non-white "blood" was seen as an impurity, a taint.

An updated understanding accommodating modern genetics was readily applied to horse and dog breeding, but it seems the concept is too convenient to some to let go of when it comes to fellow humans.

And yet there are strong physiogenic correlations among the stereotypes of race. Whether they make enough difference to care about socially or politically is more of an aesthetic decision. ("I like your kind/I scorn your kind".) Mating/breeding ability is sort of a continental drift. Horses and donkeys can breed, as can lions and tigers. They are more strongly distinguished than Australian aboriginals and Swedes. Who knows how many generations it would take before we'd start to separate procreationally, if the "races" didn't like to share their genes around the edges of their territories. We forget we've had different species of human in the past.

The bugbear is probably that if brain structure or function is in any way also correlated with the other traits (not caused, just correlated), or things like adrenaline production that might influence temper, then the whole superiority/inferiority thing all of a sudden has the possibility of legs. We've learned that redheads have different pain sensitivities, for example.

It's been known for 20 years that "alpha -melanocyte-stimulating hormone is a novel regulator of bone". (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12618359/).

phrenology strikes again

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