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based on some studies I've seen, human judges are terrible due to basic human nature, so I'd like to see something happen to make things more objective. Of cour

based on some studies I've seen, human judges are terrible due to basic human nature, so I'd like to see something happen to make things more objective. Of course, the algo would have to be open, as opposed to the proprietary software being used now. For example just having your sentencing be before lunch or at the end of the day results in harsher punishment simply due to the judge being hungry or tired. Same goes for other basic things like women getting lighter sentences, minorities harsher sentences, etc.

Verdex_2 10y ago
Apparently washing your hands also causes you to be more lenient. So AI probably shouldn't be used for sentencing, but that's more to do with all the stakeholders being clueless about the technology. The people asking for it, paying for it, using it, and building it (hey I can just throw some packages together in R right?) don't know what they're doing and are using it to significantly impact the lives of others. On the other hand, pretending an arbitrary Judge / Jury / sentencing guidelines also don't form a dynamic system with not well understood effects that's equivalent to random AI in terms of output doesn't exactly help anyone either. At the end of the day you need people who are honorable who you can trust to do the right thing (as much as it sounds like a saturday morning cartoon).
daveguy 10y ago
> Same goes for other basic things like women getting lighter sentences, minorities harsher sentences, etc. The problem is, "AI" today is glorified pattern matching. So, it learns what "should be" based on the current state. In other words because the pattern exists it will learn precisely that "women should get lighter sentences and minorities should get harsher ones" Not only that, they are so good at pattern matching that you don't even need to provide the gender or race for them to identify those as a parameter. It would be great if we could train an AI to eliminate bias, but as it is they are training to reinforce bias that already exists. Until we get natural language understanding and context aware AI, using AI for sentencing is a terrible idea.
osteele 10y ago
Humans are biased too. It might be better to move the bias where it can more easily be studied and changed. (There's an analogy to vehicle automation, where we accept a level of error in humans that we wouldn't in automation.)

Verdex_2 10y ago

Apparently washing your hands also causes you to be more lenient. So AI probably shouldn't be used for sentencing, but that's more to do with all the stakeholders being clueless about the technology. The people asking for it, paying for it, using it, and building it (hey I can just throw some packages together in R right?) don't know what they're doing and are using it to significantly impact the lives of others. On the other hand, pretending an arbitrary Judge / Jury / sentencing guidelines also don't form a dynamic system with not well understood effects that's equivalent to random AI in terms of output doesn't exactly help anyone either. At the end of the day you need people who are honorable who you can trust to do the right thing (as much as it sounds like a saturday morning cartoon).

daveguy 10y ago

> Same goes for other basic things like women getting lighter sentences, minorities harsher sentences, etc. The problem is, "AI" today is glorified pattern matching. So, it learns what "should be" based on the current state. In other words because the pattern exists it will learn precisely that "women should get lighter sentences and minorities should get harsher ones" Not only that, they are so good at pattern matching that you don't even need to provide the gender or race for them to identify those as a parameter. It would be great if we could train an AI to eliminate bias, but as it is they are training to reinforce bias that already exists. Until we get natural language understanding and context aware AI, using AI for sentencing is a terrible idea.

osteele 10y ago

Humans are biased too. It might be better to move the bias where it can more easily be studied and changed. (There's an analogy to vehicle automation, where we accept a level of error in humans that we wouldn't in automation.)