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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

(c) I always find interesting because worrying about it coming from AI implies that we don't think humans operate that way, or that it's somehow okay / acceptable / whatever that humans have subtle, hard-to-prove biases, but if those same biases show up in a machine (that we could, in theory, dissect and analyze to identify and prove those biases) it's worse.

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> I always find interesting because worrying about it coming from AI implies that we don't think humans operate that way,

No, it says “entrenching” because we know humans operate that way, but AI systems are presented as objective and removing bias, despite the fact that they demonstrably reproduce bias, and because they replace systems of people where someone could push back with a single opaque automaton that will not, they solidify the biases they incorporate.

That's an education problem, because they're emphatically not objective; they're subjectivity analyzers. They're consistent in their application of bias but it's still bias.

You are designing a promotional flyer, you have a white guy behind a desk on the front page. Its a big company, someone found the role to tell you there needs to be a black person in the image as well, and an asian, and a woman. You end up with 3 men and 3 woman one with each skin color and it looks completely ridiculous and set up so you randomize the set and end up with 3 white males. Suddenly you realize there is no way back from overthinking things.

When a human do that: you can ask for explanation, you can fire them.

When a machine do that: you "tune" it, you make the bias less obvious, it face no consequence.

This seems somewhat isomorphic to me. How is firing a human different from tuning the AI away from its previous biases?

If a machine with one set of biases displaces thousands or millions of free thinking individuals with distinct biases then that bias proliferates.

I think the issue is more that we at least recognize humans are fallible. Less so with “algorithms”.

Worrying about (c) is kind of ridiculous given how car insurance and credit checks have worked for decades.

Why do car insurance companies need to know my job again?

At least in the UK it is perfectly legal to take your job title. Come up with some abstract concept of your job. Find every job title in the standardized list which falls within that abstract category and choose the one which makes your insurance premium the lowest. Its an annual exercise for me.

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