> He knew exactly what to say to the responding officer to cover his ass Replacing human judgment with algorithms is a terrible idea for many reasons, but this

> He knew exactly what to say to the responding officer to cover his ass Replacing human judgment with algorithms is a terrible idea for many reasons, but this might be the worst. Algorithms are deterministic, and thus they can be manipulated. "SEO" services exist in spite of Google's efforts to protect their ranking algorithm. Does anybody seriously believe their local government will be more successful than Google at preventing people (i.e. police, prosecutors, etc) from "optimizing" their input to the algorithm? edit - justification for the claim that a bail algorithm would be easy to manipulate: The recent single-pixel attack[1] against image classifiers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864 Google's failure to recognize obviously inapropriate videos in their "youtube kids" app ("elsagate") https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... (a good summary & discussion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8 )