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A.I. And Big Data Could Power a New War on Poverty?

125 points by bcaulfield 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
RickHull 9y ago
There will be a big hurdle of political correctness when the machine spits out answers that don't conform to establishment dogma -- e.g. https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human-bias-an-uneasy-pair/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human... Chris Stucchio writes about this in depth: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_and_discriminatory_algorithms.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...
- wavefunction 9y ago
  The TechCrunch story seems like a misapplication of machine learning. Even when an individual is alleged to have committed a crime in the US, they enjoy the presumption of innocence. Texting someone that the police are watching them based solely on their associations seems both intentionally creepy and un-Constitutional. I suppose this is the Chicago PD though. Given their operation of "Black Sites" in contravention of the Constitution they apparently don't care too much for the Rule of Law. Your second link is quite fascinating though.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Unfortunately, social media has revived the witch hunt. People are presumed guilty till proven innocent, within the public domain. So while this is less likely to become prevalent in criminal cases, this sets up a dual system. In the public sphere you can be affected in numerous deleterious ways because there is no presumption of innocence in the public sphere. Even if you're not on social media. You can be mistakenly doxxed and suffer the consequences. We will need to come to terms with the implications of both these distinct phenomena which can result in injustice.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Just because it’s new to you, doesn’t mean that moral panics somehow didn’t exist before the internet. More importantly as with the case of sexual harassment and assault, the internet can offer a platform that doesn’t necessarily require panic to talk about basic morality.
      - jerf 9y ago
        Of course they existed. It's why we have the centuries-old term "witch hunt". The important thing is not that they are unheard of, but that they are back, after a rather long hiatus in the West. And the worst thing about the witch hunts to my mind is not that they are happening; it is the increasing amount of the population that sees them as a good thing. As long as they are targeted at the right people, of course, but the standards used for "right people" are growing quickly, too.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        A hiatus? Really? ‘80’s: The Satanic Panic ‘90’s: Crack and Rap ‘00’s: Video Games ‘10’s: OMGZ Teh Internet!
        jerf 9y ago
        I lived through all of that. It was not continuous like it is now. It was intermittent. If the media had not been ginning them up for the temporal equivalent of "page views" they wouldn't have happened at all. Now "the people" can generate them on their own. (The media still runs along behind fanning the flames, but they're working to keep up rather than leading it now.) There has been a fundamental change in how they work now.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        That’s essentially the same argument which was levied against the Gutenberg press, and the home telephone, the crossbow, and virtually all significant advances which served to empower more people at the expense of hierarchy.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Those issues aren't different, morally, than good old-fashioned racial profiling, or really any other discriminatory use of stereotypes. If you're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words. Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?
  - RickHull 9y ago
    > If you're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words. I'm not cheering for anything. I'm pointing out that machines may have a distasteful view of the world and that this will be a stumbling block for using them effectively. > Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage? I'd appreciate it if you could tone down the hysterical moral outrage, particularly when aimed in my direction.
    - gowld 9y ago
      You can't use terms like "big hurdle of political correctness" and "establishment dogma" and then pretend you didn't start the "hysterical moral outrage"
      - RickHull 9y ago
        Really? That just seems like a dispassionate accounting of facts. There are such things as political correctness and establishment dogma, and these things constrain large scale social programs. I don't see the hysteria or moral outrage as such.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      My outrage isn't directed at your moral failings,which are unfortunately all too common, but at your intellectual failures. You are misrepresenting the status quo when you're insinuating that some "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to defend "political correctness". This is obviously wrong. Such rights, and others like privacy or the right to a fair trial, only make sense under the assumption that their violation would in some ways benefit law enforcement. Otherwise there'd be no need to protect them. While the argument that, for example, "torture doesn't work" is sometimes made, it is always secondary to "our civilisation is better than that, and it is strong enough to accept a (small) hit in effectiveness in the defence of fundamental rights". So when you believe you've stumbled onto some greater truth, and that the world needs to hear some tough talk of realism, you've simply missed the essential message of enlightenment, and are reverting to 16th-century morals.
rdudekul 9y ago
The article seems a little shallow. Many questions are left unanswered. Just projecting where the future jobs will be OR customizing learning based on preferable modes of learning, probably will NOT eliminate poverty. Universal basic income along with more humane policies could help.
- bcaulfield 9y ago
  Love the comments on here. I posted this article not because I agree with the article's take, but because I wanted to see what the HN community thinks of the article (and the topic). I haven't been disappointed!
- smoll 9y ago
  Agreed. Even the very early results in UBI have shown it to be extremely promising for those hit hardest by poverty, and shows a novel rethinking of the problem. Using AI to attack the fundamental problem of human QoL vs. automation/efficiency/profits is just continuing to escalate a never-ending arms race.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
This is really petty, but the phrase "war on poverty" makes my emotional mind think you're _against_ the poor, not uplifting the poor.
- ynonym00s 9y ago
  hmm, it is a war on poverty, not on the poor.
  - misterbowfinger 9y ago
    totally, for some reason my mind just goes towards the possible negative interpretation
  - lightbyte 9y ago
    The "war on drugs" wasn't a war on drugs, it was a war on drug users. I can see why the OP was confused.
- genzoman 9y ago
  IMO all war ever produces is more war. Nobody that's fighting the war on poverty, because if they win, they won't have a job. Terrorism, hunger, poverty, whatever, you name it, when we start a war against it you only make more.
- charlescearl 9y ago
  For those of us born 1965 and earlier it evokes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty One tragedy of history is the the deeply flawed LBJ trying to eradicate poverty in the US but mired in a brutal war against an impoverished Vietnam. The metaphor of collective effort against an ill as war — unfortunate as it is — was probably relevant in that for most US adults of the 1960s the signature mass collective effort still in memory was WWII. Ironically many of the algorithmic bias problems detailed by Cathy O’Neil, Moritz Hardt, and others seem like a technological attack upon the poor (algorithmic bias in policing, sentencing, predatory lending, etc). I wish the effort described here the best, there is much potential.
geggam 9y ago
Can we quit having wars on things ? Everything we have a war against gets worse.
- sp332 9y ago
  It's not a real war. LBJ noted that war seems to get heaps of money shoveled on it while basic domestic stuff goes unfunded. So declaring a war on poverty is a way to anchor the amount of money spent up where people think of funding wars instead of down where they think of funding welfare programs.
  - dang 9y ago
    All true, but I think geggam still has a point. What if framing these things as wars is somehow part of why they don't work?
    - 3131s 9y ago
      You might find this paper interesting, into explores the idea of framing things as war: https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson80.pdf https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson... There's a book from the same authors that contains a more expansive list of metaphors and examples.
  - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
    True, but it also sets expectations that can't be met - we won't 'win' these wars, poverty won't 'surrender' and whether or not progress is made, we won't 'lose' this war either.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Also, using the word "war" to address waste, poverty, terrorism, "drugs" and so on normalizes the idea that war is a good and necessary thing. In most other cultures people don't use the word war metaphorically because it's seen as a terrible thing.
jasonmaydie 9y ago
I admire the authors optimism but this is just another wishy washy article that someone seems to to have thought up while sitting on the toilet. Her main points are, while AI will put people out of jobs "big data" can help match people who lots jobs with all the unfilled positions we have (like picking fruits in a field or bathroom cleaning or something like that). AI can help "tutor" our kids so teaching can be tailored to each child/person without lobbing us into classrooms with the same curriculum and lastly, it will help distribute welfare services efficiently (or something)
- randoonhere 9y ago
  The author is a woman
MechEStudent 9y ago
Wars on poverty often become wars on poor people. I was there when Clinton reduced max coverage to 2 years. It was a sentence of lifetime poverty for people who had no option, and that was strongly enhanced by the "human glue".
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  This. I am leery of anything calling it a war on poverty. If you are waging war on poverty, who is your enemy? Obvious answer: poor people.
- gowld 9y ago
  War on Poverty was a Johnson program. You can't cite Clinton's backing away from War of Poverty as an argument against War on Poverty.
  - ttonkytonk 9y ago
    I think the idea here is that cutting benefits could be construed as part of the War on Poverty by the argument that the benefits locked people into poverty.
zzzeek 9y ago
Unemployment is only at around 4% right now, extremely low. Want to take a huge bite out of poverty? raise the minimum wage and increase benefits so that folks don't need to work three jobs just to pay their rent. no AI robots needed. just garden variety wealth redistribution that's sorely needed.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Raising the minimum wage will simply result in jobs being replaced by kiosks. Not that it won't happen soon anyway, but why hasten it.
  - zzzeek 9y ago
    Here, argue with the Economic Policy Institute regarding this very basic and widely recognized economic fact: http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-anymore-raising/ http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-...
    - neuronexmachina 9y ago
      The EPI piece actually doesn't address the other commenter's point in any way.
  - c0nducktr 9y ago
    Why keep putting it off? Isn't this the whole point of technology? So that humans will no longer have to do these jobs? Lets just have it happen and deal with the consequences. Why keep kicking the can down the road?
    - 111_1_111 9y ago
      Because it will be much easier to deal with an increase in joblessness/transition to different types of work if it doesn't happen all at once.
      - deleted 9y ago
meri_dian 9y ago
This article is talking about analytics. Analytics will have a marginal impact at best on reducing poverty. Of course people working in analytics have been benefited by it through the income it has given them, but the cumulative effects of analyzing data will not lead to some epiphany that will help us to end poverty. In order to bring about structural change of the scale needed to end poverty, we need to reach levels of technology, productivity and social organization that we have not yet reached today. We will not ascend to this level by analyzing some set of socio-economic data. We will reach this point by building machines that can do work for us and automating entire supply chains so that labor no longer impacts production costs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nightski 9y ago
  Do you know of any resources that explore this potential in depth (books, articles, etc..)? I'd be very curious. It's one thing to just say "building machines that can do the work for us" but what are all of the implications of this? Will the machines self maintain? Will they build themselves? How would we avoid needing massive teams of people to maintain all of this technology? How would power management and costs work? Even if it is semi-fiction I'd love to read others thoughts on the subject.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    The future I and many others envision is one in which that's all taken care of by machines. From power generation to maintenance, etc. I believe we have yet to fully appreciate the ability of a developed economy to produce jobs and work for people to do. Even if we automate the entirety of the food production, mining and energy generation industries, new forms of work will spring up to absorb anyone that may have been displaced by automation. Whenever some work is automated, people insert themselves on top of that layer of production to form a new layer. This process continues ad infinitum. At least that's been the case for the entire history of organized human society.
jacquesm 9y ago
The more likely outcome here is that AI and Big Data will be used to extract some of the remaining funds that poor people have by tweaking business models and marketing to become just that much more efficient.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
As excited as I am for the breathtaking advances in machine learning over the past decade, I am equally displeased with the media’s mad rush to tout AI as a magic elixir of the modern era. Our societies have been constructed over a long period of time with gaping inefficiencies. Case in point: the automobile. Yes, back when the alternatives were capital-intensive railroads or poop-intensive stagecoaches, automobiles offered unprecedented mobility. Yet in our blind rush towards our perceived ideal of modernity, we built cities to satisfy the needs of the automobile first, and people second, or last (thanks GM!). Self-driving cars could make transportation easier, faster, and more accessible, but it’s an awful lot of assumed progress that doesn’t factor in the inherent and damaging inefficiencies of the automobile: -Cities are built for cars. Wide streets make walking worse. When I spent a month in Rome I never needed to use a car because everything was so much closer to my front door. -Suburbs are unsustainable. They require a scale of infrastructure (water, electric, gas, pavement, internet, etc) that is far more expensive per mile than in dense cities, and anybody whose home street has been pulverized to dust can tell you that there is simply neither money nor will to pay forward our expensive past mistakes. -More roads suck. Anybody from car-centric cities (LA, ATL) knows that with massive 8 lane highways comes equally massive amounts of drivers. LA has highways everywhere and they’re basically always packed. Is that a sign of a working or a breaking system? -Cars are expensive. People who need cars to work get tied into expensive loans which hamper their economic potential. And Uber is not even on the same planet of being close enough in price to replace ownership with access. If poor people didn’t need cars, they would be less poor. Poor people in the developed world who spend a great deal of their paychecks on transportation are the first world equivalent of the third world villager who spends most of their productive time securing fresh water for their families (which we take for granted comes clean out of the tap). If we really want the world to improve, we cannot simply tweak the edges of a broken system. Just the example of automobiles shows how fiddling with algorithms only serves to further bake-in our structural inefficiencies. We have to be willing to put anything and everything on the table for debate. In short, we have to restructure all of our society to attain the lowest cost of living for all people. Otherwise we will keep developing radical technologies while scratching our heads and wondering why the poor keep getting poorer.
V2hLe0ThslzRaV2 9y ago
Poverty is a social issue, it has almost nothing to do with tech fundamentally and tech normally only amplifies social beliefs, it rarely fixes them.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Indeed, it seems what we need to end poverty is more "heart" (empathy), rather than mind (intelligence)
DoreenMichele 9y ago
But the condition of poverty often entails one or more of these realities: a lack of income (joblessness); a lack of preparedness (education); and a dependency on government services (welfare). A.I. can address all three. Wow, and not in a good way. Reading that makes me apoplectic. My first instinct is to write something full of swear words and insults that wouldn't meet HN guidelines. First, poverty is gendered. One of the things that drives poverty for women is the cultural expectation that we provide caregiving to our own children and other relatives essentially for free and that society owes us nothing for this imposition on our time and energy. There are other factors, but that's a big one. The next thing that drives poverty is various intractable personal problems, such as health issues, learning disabilities and mental health issues. One thing society can do to reduce the degree to which such issues separate the Haves from the Have Nots is to provide universal health care. Dependency on government services is driven in part by poor design of services such that getting on them actively cripples your ability to get off of them. This entire article sounds like a snide way to blame poor people for their problems rather than look for actual solutions. I can't believe they say in the same article that a) jobs are outright going away and b) the solution for unemployed people is superior job matching services. If there are no jobs to get, you don't have a matching problem. This is such utter drivel. Wow.
- Kamshak 9y ago
  Had a very similar reaction to this.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Friendly heads up: HN norms are that you simply upvote, instead of replying with a comment that basically boils down to "I agree" and no other info.
- justonepost 9y ago
  These are fair comments, however I think it's reasonable to say that we need more automation in the home and personal care. Health Care, IMHO, should be solved by AI and Big Data. I'm a free market person and I believe if the government tried to legislate this, it would screw it up. Rather it should try to open the way for the private industry to create AI based health care solutions. I'd also like to see character based communities with minimal basic income. Ie, your economic output is not relevant, but rather your character. How kind you are to others, how passionate you are about your talents, how independent you are about looking after yourself. I think this is the real solution to poverty in a world of increased automation. I know some people want UBI without strings attached, but my feeling is that without some kind of purpose (even a non economic one) mental health issues will increase.
Corence 9y ago
Second, we can bring what is known as differentiated education — based on the idea that students master skills in different ways and at different speeds — to every student in the country. A 2013 study by the National Institutes of Health found that nearly 40 percent of medical students held a strong preference for one mode of learning: Some were listeners; others were visual learners; still others learned best by doing. This study was a 100 person survey with no experimental evidence to back up people's beliefs. I've been working with educators for a while, and they've said that "learning styles" are just a myth with no solid evidence. All this survey says is that people think they learn best via one method, but people are notoriously bad at knowing what is an effective way of learning. In surveys people overvalue the "intensity" of a learning experience [1], which makes them think things like a 3-week bootcamp are more effective, when really spaced repetition is a better use of time. At least in the US, there are many easier ways we could improve our education methods before resorting to ML-driven customization. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9854.full http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9854.full
- gowld 9y ago
  > "learning styles" are just a myth with no solid evidence. > when really spaced repetition is a better use of time. So, which is it?
  - Kalium 9y ago
    I believe the comment you are responding to would say "both". The learning styles to which they refer is the notion that different people learn better through visual or audio or hands-on experience. Spaced repetition versus intensive study is a different question, one of practice and time use, that doesn't address the question or value of "style". At least, that's how I understand it. As a casual interpreter of someone else's comment, I could of course be wildly wrong.
- TheLegace 9y ago
  I don't really have experimental data to back this up. But after struggling for my entire life until recently with learning this is the experience I have had studying for my last course(after a decade of struggling to study). I use to write everything down, it was the only way to retain whatever little information that I was capable of retaining. I never had enough confidence to NOT write everything. Realizing that all my abilities were impaired because of improper cognitive development. I decided to start from scratch, having nothing developed and picking one area that I was suited to. I have been practicing reciting rap lyrics of Eminem and Nas(not really for any reason, it was just fun). What I realized is that now my ability to recall information was significantly improved at least from a verbal learning style perspective. And it only took a few months develop. While studying for my final I went back to my old habits of writing every single detail down and realizing I will never have enough time to write it all down. So I started reciting knowledge the same way I would recite rap lyrics and I retained EVERYTHING. I have never studied so little, yet I aced my exam got an A in the course and was proud. Moral of the story is that people are different, and while most people may learn from one method, it doesn't mean they will have that capability developed at the time they need it. So they have to learn to adapt with what is available to them. edit: I will add that again poverty is the source of all this. My parents grew up in severe poverty and never were able to develop these skills properly and I had to suffer because of that.
dang 9y ago
Despite the consensus that the article is pretty bad, the discussion here is pretty good (edit: or at least was to begin with). For a hot-contro submission, that's rare. So instead of downweighting the post itself, I'm going to leave it unpenalized except for a question mark of protest in the title.
undoware 9y ago
Good lord. This comment of mine is probably going to get deprecated down to -1 and beyond, but it needs saying anyway: We already have a perfectly good technology for combatting poverty. It's called socialism. How many people read this article on the way to work, on their expensive new Christmas phones, absentmindedly stepping over homeless people they only semi-see. It's not the tech that's the problem. It's us. All of us. Shape up and start giving your resources away. If you need specific recommendations, ask.
- anonemouse145 9y ago
  How do homeless fare is socialist nations? Hint: You might want to start looking in the mass graves. (See also: The Scandinavian countries repeatedly having press conferences to say no, we are not socialist.)
  - ttonkytonk 9y ago
    That's because they combine the welfare state with free market capitalism, known as the "Nordic Model".
Shivetya 9y ago
all your big Data A.I. matching of people to jobs won't amount to much because lack of mobility keeps people in areas where there are no jobs. I am very sure many unemployed would love to work if they could be where the job is and be where it is I mean in the same town, something they could drive or bus to.
rangersanger 9y ago
AI will far more likely power a new war on the poor than power a war to fight poverty. Through new ways to discriminate in lending/housing (1), and new ways to discriminate in hiring (2), new ways to discriminate in policing (3.) AI will be no boon to the poor. It will be a new tool for the wealthy to use math as smoke screen for practices they have used for centuries to keep the poor poor and the rich rich. 1)https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai-could-resurrect-a-racist-housing-policy https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai-could-r... & https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is-artificial-intelligence-a-threat-to-fair-lending https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is-artificial-intelligen... 2)http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2112786/updated-laws-needed-hong-kong-can-embrace-artificial http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2112786/u... 3) https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  I am not sure exactly how you would fight a "war on poverty" without also fighting a "war on the poor." This is some "we are going to invade your country and force you to be free" level Orwellian thinking.
  - rangersanger 9y ago
    By helping the poor out of poverty instead of strengthening the mechanisms that put them there to keep them there. I'm not sure how exactly that's Orwellian thinking, please explain.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mLuby 9y ago
      "War is Welfare" is fairly Orwellian.
  - maze-le 9y ago
    That is because the "war on ..."-metaphors are pretty much bullshit talk. If you want to look like a strong person, that takes an issue seriously, declare a war on a concept... Its a simple propaganda technique, aimed at people, that are easily impressed by bellicose statements. But it wears off quickly. Especially if one considers how other "wars on concepts" are going (war on drugs, war on terror)
Havoc 9y ago
As they say, the cleverest minds are too busy trying to optimise ad clicks.
balance_factor 9y ago
There are two sides in every war, and in the war on poverty, those fighting to create and preserve poverty currently hold most of the cards. Harken back to 2000 and let us read the business press...I will pick one article by example ( http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ )...what does the article say? "Joblessness at 30-year low...The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in April, the government reported Friday, as worker-starved companies raised wages and went on a hiring spree that created 340,000 new jobs. But the good news for workers on Main Street sparked fears on Wall Street" What? Workers looking for a job being more easily able to get a job is something that sparks fear on Wall Street ? "Still, the markets took the data in stride...The markets harbor no doubts of the Fed's concerns over labor market tightness." Both "the markets" and "the Fed" are concerned that so many people are employed? Basically this CNNfn article is saying, correctly, that Americans wanting a job being able to get a job is something that is feared by Wall Street, "markets", The Fed etc., not something that is desired. As that is the way the system is set up, and this is not the only business press article or pronouncement of that time saying this, one has to be skeptical of the desire for a "war on poverty". Because as it says, Wall Street, "the markets", The Fed and most of the powers that be are deathly afraid of that happening. They are in the business of preserving poverty, and creating it when necessary. Of course, this article was written by a corporation owned by people who feel this way. So this is about as blunt an explanation as you're going to get from them, or the mass media, which is completely owned and controlled by them. For a clearer explanation of all of this from a source independent of that, you might try consulting a source such as this - https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-stagnation https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...
lsc 9y ago
Eh, if jobs are going away, we need more jobs more than we need matchmaking for existing jobs. I can tell you from personal experience that there is a huge difference between working when there are more jobs than qualified workers and working when there are more qualified workers than jobs, and the humane way to balance that equation in favor of us workers is to create more jobs. (It is interesting, though, because who is qualified is a subjective thing; either to the whims of a human manager, or whatever hidden statistical correlation the ML algorithm found. Right now, my impression is that standards are much higher for new grads than when I broke into the industry, and much lower for the higher end jobs that I now compete for.) Which isn't to say that the matchmaking problem isn't difficult or important or interesting, but it's certainly not the whole of the problem. (Also, where I am, my employer pays a rather large cut of what I earn to the matchmaker. like 30% though it varies a lot, as far as I can tell. Rather more than I pay in rent. At my end of the market, my marginal dollars are devalued to the point where I'm still making a really good living on my 70%... but if I was making a lot less, that 30% could really matter. From that perspective, inserting a matchmaker into the low end might contribute to the further impoverishment of the poor.)
kevin_b_er 9y ago
I doubt it will help to combat poverty. It will be used as a tool by the rich to extract more money and increase poverty. Who will wield these AI tools that is supposed to be used to fight poverty? Corporations are for-profit and a corporate sociopath cannot be concerned about limiting profit to help the poor. They'll want to use AI as a new tool to increase profits. This will come at the expense of the human populace at large. My government in the United States of America is rapidly falling to greed. Corporations only act nominally concerned about the poor as a PR act to prevent the rage of the populace from using government against them. Since my government is even further down the slide into plutocracy than ever before, this government will neither stop the greed-based corporate use of AI nor will it use it to help the poor, because there's no money for their rich patrons in helping the poor. Even you want this magic AI tech to help the poor, who will do it? Where will you get the data in the first place to feed into this A.I. and Big Data magic machine? I argue the two sources above will not be a help in so far as they might threaten the greed they exhibit.
colordrops 9y ago
Is it so far fetched that perhaps the existence of so much poverty is intentional, or at least caused by human action and inaction? The power structures have a lot directly and indirectly invested in keeping the common man down. With current technology and productivity, humans should be capable of lifting even 20 billion people out of poverty but market inefficiencies caused by corporate greed and border controls reduce that capability by orders of magnitude.
Top19 9y ago
What this article describes is a terrible, confused, scary nightmare. From the very first picture that begins the article on-down, Elizabeth Mason advocates an absolutely frightening system that is made even more scary by how she comes through as genuinely/naively believing in it all. > Big data promises something closer to an unbiased, ideology-free evaluation of the effectiveness of these social programs. We could come closer to the vision of a meritocratic, technocratic society that politicians from both parties at state and local levels — those closest to the practical problems their constituents face — have begun to embrace. First, meritocracy was first brought up as a joke by the author who coined the term. Second, who is advocating for this “technocratic vision” short of Silicon Valley CEOs? This “vision” of centralized, unbiased analysis by top-notch planners was what we had in Vietnam or with GOSPLAN in the USSR, not what we need now. Third, AI works fast, which means even if it’s 75% less “ideological” or whatever, it’s rate of speed is so fast that it will magnify any and all biases that might be lurking inside. To imagine that it is unbiased is crazy, let alone to think that it wouldn’t be used to some horrible malevolent end (cough China cough). This article made me sick, but it was so uplifting and wonderful to see all the other negative reactions on here and that this is not representative of HN.
pasbesoin 9y ago
I'm bad for only having read the headline, so far. But the only way I see this playing out, is in a bad way, i.e. war on the impoverished. Human history has a long and fairly consistent set of precedents. More and more, the domestic U.S. from 1945 - circa 1980, appears to be the exception rather than the rule. (An exception not equally shared and also purchased at the price of some populations abroad, e.g. with respect to natural resource extraction.)
yakitori 9y ago
Rather than focusing on poverty, I wonder if we should be focusing on wealth disparity/inequality instead. It seems like reduction of poverty is being used to distract from and even justify the increased wealth inequality. Reducing poverty is a noble goal but the scary systematic problem to me is the ever growing concentration of wealth amongst a tiny elite and the decline of the middle class. And I don't see how AI/machine learning + big data can decrease wealth inequality when a small few control the data and the AI.
- dashoffset 9y ago
  I fail to see how wealth inequality is a problem worse than poverty. I also fail to see why we can't try to fix both poverty and inequality at the same time.
akeck 9y ago
Maybe. It’s also possible that self-interested parties will use AI to further disenfranchise the poor. For example black box denial of access to a checking account into perpetuity due to an AI-driven risk score.
partycoder 9y ago
Well, so far AI is being used to squeeze more money from people. Advertising, pricing, getting people to spend more time, etc.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  And on the other hand: spam filtering, web search, reducing power consumption in data centres, reading MRI images, etc. Good things.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    We all benefit from these products and services, but at a cost that we do not always understand.
metafrag 9y ago
It would be awesome if people stopped talking about the alleviation of societal ills by saying that people will "go to war" on them. Poverty isn't something you war on. Poverty's something people are lifted out of.
skc 9y ago
The only way this can succeed is if it can be proven that the rich and powerful can become even more rich and powerful through the reduction of poverty.
myaso 9y ago
This is load of reasonable sounding horseshit. This tech is excellent at extracting every drop of potential value that flows through organization boundaries and little else (self driving cars aren't reality yet, when my mother is in a self driving car my opinion will change) The thought of an online system that can do this being bolted onto government IT systems on this scale is hilarious, the bottleneck here isn't knowledge of AI or deep learning. It is an idealistic future that fails to take into account all the shit it will have to be built upon. I'll interpert the title in it's literally sense -- another way for the poor to get fucked over by something they don't understand!

125 points by bcaulfield 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

There will be a big hurdle of political correctness when the machine spits out answers that don't conform to establishment dogma -- e.g. https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human-bias-an-uneasy-pair/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/02/machine-learning-and-human... Chris Stucchio writes about this in depth: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_and_discriminatory_algorithms.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...

wavefunction 9y ago
The TechCrunch story seems like a misapplication of machine learning. Even when an individual is alleged to have committed a crime in the US, they enjoy the presumption of innocence. Texting someone that the police are watching them based solely on their associations seems both intentionally creepy and un-Constitutional. I suppose this is the Chicago PD though. Given their operation of "Black Sites" in contravention of the Constitution they apparently don't care too much for the Rule of Law. Your second link is quite fascinating though.
- mc32 9y ago
  Unfortunately, social media has revived the witch hunt. People are presumed guilty till proven innocent, within the public domain. So while this is less likely to become prevalent in criminal cases, this sets up a dual system. In the public sphere you can be affected in numerous deleterious ways because there is no presumption of innocence in the public sphere. Even if you're not on social media. You can be mistakenly doxxed and suffer the consequences. We will need to come to terms with the implications of both these distinct phenomena which can result in injustice.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Just because it’s new to you, doesn’t mean that moral panics somehow didn’t exist before the internet. More importantly as with the case of sexual harassment and assault, the internet can offer a platform that doesn’t necessarily require panic to talk about basic morality.
    - jerf 9y ago
      Of course they existed. It's why we have the centuries-old term "witch hunt". The important thing is not that they are unheard of, but that they are back, after a rather long hiatus in the West. And the worst thing about the witch hunts to my mind is not that they are happening; it is the increasing amount of the population that sees them as a good thing. As long as they are targeted at the right people, of course, but the standards used for "right people" are growing quickly, too.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        A hiatus? Really? ‘80’s: The Satanic Panic ‘90’s: Crack and Rap ‘00’s: Video Games ‘10’s: OMGZ Teh Internet!
        jerf 9y ago
        I lived through all of that. It was not continuous like it is now. It was intermittent. If the media had not been ginning them up for the temporal equivalent of "page views" they wouldn't have happened at all. Now "the people" can generate them on their own. (The media still runs along behind fanning the flames, but they're working to keep up rather than leading it now.) There has been a fundamental change in how they work now.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        That’s essentially the same argument which was levied against the Gutenberg press, and the home telephone, the crossbow, and virtually all significant advances which served to empower more people at the expense of hierarchy.
matt4077 9y ago
Those issues aren't different, morally, than good old-fashioned racial profiling, or really any other discriminatory use of stereotypes. If you're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words. Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?
- RickHull 9y ago
  > If you're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words. I'm not cheering for anything. I'm pointing out that machines may have a distasteful view of the world and that this will be a stumbling block for using them effectively. > Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage? I'd appreciate it if you could tone down the hysterical moral outrage, particularly when aimed in my direction.
  - gowld 9y ago
    You can't use terms like "big hurdle of political correctness" and "establishment dogma" and then pretend you didn't start the "hysterical moral outrage"
    - RickHull 9y ago
      Really? That just seems like a dispassionate accounting of facts. There are such things as political correctness and establishment dogma, and these things constrain large scale social programs. I don't see the hysteria or moral outrage as such.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    My outrage isn't directed at your moral failings,which are unfortunately all too common, but at your intellectual failures. You are misrepresenting the status quo when you're insinuating that some "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to defend "political correctness". This is obviously wrong. Such rights, and others like privacy or the right to a fair trial, only make sense under the assumption that their violation would in some ways benefit law enforcement. Otherwise there'd be no need to protect them. While the argument that, for example, "torture doesn't work" is sometimes made, it is always secondary to "our civilisation is better than that, and it is strong enough to accept a (small) hit in effectiveness in the defence of fundamental rights". So when you believe you've stumbled onto some greater truth, and that the world needs to hear some tough talk of realism, you've simply missed the essential message of enlightenment, and are reverting to 16th-century morals.

rdudekul 9y ago

The article seems a little shallow. Many questions are left unanswered. Just projecting where the future jobs will be OR customizing learning based on preferable modes of learning, probably will NOT eliminate poverty. Universal basic income along with more humane policies could help.

bcaulfield 9y ago
Love the comments on here. I posted this article not because I agree with the article's take, but because I wanted to see what the HN community thinks of the article (and the topic). I haven't been disappointed!
smoll 9y ago
Agreed. Even the very early results in UBI have shown it to be extremely promising for those hit hardest by poverty, and shows a novel rethinking of the problem. Using AI to attack the fundamental problem of human QoL vs. automation/efficiency/profits is just continuing to escalate a never-ending arms race.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

This is really petty, but the phrase "war on poverty" makes my emotional mind think you're _against_ the poor, not uplifting the poor.

ynonym00s 9y ago
hmm, it is a war on poverty, not on the poor.
- misterbowfinger 9y ago
  totally, for some reason my mind just goes towards the possible negative interpretation
- lightbyte 9y ago
  The "war on drugs" wasn't a war on drugs, it was a war on drug users. I can see why the OP was confused.
genzoman 9y ago
IMO all war ever produces is more war. Nobody that's fighting the war on poverty, because if they win, they won't have a job. Terrorism, hunger, poverty, whatever, you name it, when we start a war against it you only make more.
charlescearl 9y ago
For those of us born 1965 and earlier it evokes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty One tragedy of history is the the deeply flawed LBJ trying to eradicate poverty in the US but mired in a brutal war against an impoverished Vietnam. The metaphor of collective effort against an ill as war — unfortunate as it is — was probably relevant in that for most US adults of the 1960s the signature mass collective effort still in memory was WWII. Ironically many of the algorithmic bias problems detailed by Cathy O’Neil, Moritz Hardt, and others seem like a technological attack upon the poor (algorithmic bias in policing, sentencing, predatory lending, etc). I wish the effort described here the best, there is much potential.

geggam 9y ago

Can we quit having wars on things ? Everything we have a war against gets worse.

sp332 9y ago
It's not a real war. LBJ noted that war seems to get heaps of money shoveled on it while basic domestic stuff goes unfunded. So declaring a war on poverty is a way to anchor the amount of money spent up where people think of funding wars instead of down where they think of funding welfare programs.
- dang 9y ago
  All true, but I think geggam still has a point. What if framing these things as wars is somehow part of why they don't work?
  - 3131s 9y ago
    You might find this paper interesting, into explores the idea of framing things as war: https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson80.pdf https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson... There's a book from the same authors that contains a more expansive list of metaphors and examples.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  True, but it also sets expectations that can't be met - we won't 'win' these wars, poverty won't 'surrender' and whether or not progress is made, we won't 'lose' this war either.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
Also, using the word "war" to address waste, poverty, terrorism, "drugs" and so on normalizes the idea that war is a good and necessary thing. In most other cultures people don't use the word war metaphorically because it's seen as a terrible thing.

jasonmaydie 9y ago

I admire the authors optimism but this is just another wishy washy article that someone seems to to have thought up while sitting on the toilet. Her main points are, while AI will put people out of jobs "big data" can help match people who lots jobs with all the unfilled positions we have (like picking fruits in a field or bathroom cleaning or something like that). AI can help "tutor" our kids so teaching can be tailored to each child/person without lobbing us into classrooms with the same curriculum and lastly, it will help distribute welfare services efficiently (or something)

randoonhere 9y ago
The author is a woman

MechEStudent 9y ago

Wars on poverty often become wars on poor people. I was there when Clinton reduced max coverage to 2 years. It was a sentence of lifetime poverty for people who had no option, and that was strongly enhanced by the "human glue".

DoreenMichele 9y ago
This. I am leery of anything calling it a war on poverty. If you are waging war on poverty, who is your enemy? Obvious answer: poor people.
gowld 9y ago
War on Poverty was a Johnson program. You can't cite Clinton's backing away from War of Poverty as an argument against War on Poverty.
- ttonkytonk 9y ago
  I think the idea here is that cutting benefits could be construed as part of the War on Poverty by the argument that the benefits locked people into poverty.

zzzeek 9y ago

Unemployment is only at around 4% right now, extremely low. Want to take a huge bite out of poverty? raise the minimum wage and increase benefits so that folks don't need to work three jobs just to pay their rent. no AI robots needed. just garden variety wealth redistribution that's sorely needed.

Danihan 9y ago
Raising the minimum wage will simply result in jobs being replaced by kiosks. Not that it won't happen soon anyway, but why hasten it.
- zzzeek 9y ago
  Here, argue with the Economic Policy Institute regarding this very basic and widely recognized economic fact: http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-anymore-raising/ http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-...
  - neuronexmachina 9y ago
    The EPI piece actually doesn't address the other commenter's point in any way.
- c0nducktr 9y ago
  Why keep putting it off? Isn't this the whole point of technology? So that humans will no longer have to do these jobs? Lets just have it happen and deal with the consequences. Why keep kicking the can down the road?
  - 111_1_111 9y ago
    Because it will be much easier to deal with an increase in joblessness/transition to different types of work if it doesn't happen all at once.
    - deleted 9y ago

meri_dian 9y ago

This article is talking about analytics. Analytics will have a marginal impact at best on reducing poverty. Of course people working in analytics have been benefited by it through the income it has given them, but the cumulative effects of analyzing data will not lead to some epiphany that will help us to end poverty. In order to bring about structural change of the scale needed to end poverty, we need to reach levels of technology, productivity and social organization that we have not yet reached today. We will not ascend to this level by analyzing some set of socio-economic data. We will reach this point by building machines that can do work for us and automating entire supply chains so that labor no longer impacts production costs.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nightski 9y ago
Do you know of any resources that explore this potential in depth (books, articles, etc..)? I'd be very curious. It's one thing to just say "building machines that can do the work for us" but what are all of the implications of this? Will the machines self maintain? Will they build themselves? How would we avoid needing massive teams of people to maintain all of this technology? How would power management and costs work? Even if it is semi-fiction I'd love to read others thoughts on the subject.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  The future I and many others envision is one in which that's all taken care of by machines. From power generation to maintenance, etc. I believe we have yet to fully appreciate the ability of a developed economy to produce jobs and work for people to do. Even if we automate the entirety of the food production, mining and energy generation industries, new forms of work will spring up to absorb anyone that may have been displaced by automation. Whenever some work is automated, people insert themselves on top of that layer of production to form a new layer. This process continues ad infinitum. At least that's been the case for the entire history of organized human society.

jacquesm 9y ago

The more likely outcome here is that AI and Big Data will be used to extract some of the remaining funds that poor people have by tweaking business models and marketing to become just that much more efficient.

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

As excited as I am for the breathtaking advances in machine learning over the past decade, I am equally displeased with the media’s mad rush to tout AI as a magic elixir of the modern era. Our societies have been constructed over a long period of time with gaping inefficiencies. Case in point: the automobile. Yes, back when the alternatives were capital-intensive railroads or poop-intensive stagecoaches, automobiles offered unprecedented mobility. Yet in our blind rush towards our perceived ideal of modernity, we built cities to satisfy the needs of the automobile first, and people second, or last (thanks GM!). Self-driving cars could make transportation easier, faster, and more accessible, but it’s an awful lot of assumed progress that doesn’t factor in the inherent and damaging inefficiencies of the automobile: -Cities are built for cars. Wide streets make walking worse. When I spent a month in Rome I never needed to use a car because everything was so much closer to my front door. -Suburbs are unsustainable. They require a scale of infrastructure (water, electric, gas, pavement, internet, etc) that is far more expensive per mile than in dense cities, and anybody whose home street has been pulverized to dust can tell you that there is simply neither money nor will to pay forward our expensive past mistakes. -More roads suck. Anybody from car-centric cities (LA, ATL) knows that with massive 8 lane highways comes equally massive amounts of drivers. LA has highways everywhere and they’re basically always packed. Is that a sign of a working or a breaking system? -Cars are expensive. People who need cars to work get tied into expensive loans which hamper their economic potential. And Uber is not even on the same planet of being close enough in price to replace ownership with access. If poor people didn’t need cars, they would be less poor. Poor people in the developed world who spend a great deal of their paychecks on transportation are the first world equivalent of the third world villager who spends most of their productive time securing fresh water for their families (which we take for granted comes clean out of the tap). If we really want the world to improve, we cannot simply tweak the edges of a broken system. Just the example of automobiles shows how fiddling with algorithms only serves to further bake-in our structural inefficiencies. We have to be willing to put anything and everything on the table for debate. In short, we have to restructure all of our society to attain the lowest cost of living for all people. Otherwise we will keep developing radical technologies while scratching our heads and wondering why the poor keep getting poorer.

V2hLe0ThslzRaV2 9y ago

Poverty is a social issue, it has almost nothing to do with tech fundamentally and tech normally only amplifies social beliefs, it rarely fixes them.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
Indeed, it seems what we need to end poverty is more "heart" (empathy), rather than mind (intelligence)

DoreenMichele 9y ago

But the condition of poverty often entails one or more of these realities: a lack of income (joblessness); a lack of preparedness (education); and a dependency on government services (welfare). A.I. can address all three. Wow, and not in a good way. Reading that makes me apoplectic. My first instinct is to write something full of swear words and insults that wouldn't meet HN guidelines. First, poverty is gendered. One of the things that drives poverty for women is the cultural expectation that we provide caregiving to our own children and other relatives essentially for free and that society owes us nothing for this imposition on our time and energy. There are other factors, but that's a big one. The next thing that drives poverty is various intractable personal problems, such as health issues, learning disabilities and mental health issues. One thing society can do to reduce the degree to which such issues separate the Haves from the Have Nots is to provide universal health care. Dependency on government services is driven in part by poor design of services such that getting on them actively cripples your ability to get off of them. This entire article sounds like a snide way to blame poor people for their problems rather than look for actual solutions. I can't believe they say in the same article that a) jobs are outright going away and b) the solution for unemployed people is superior job matching services. If there are no jobs to get, you don't have a matching problem. This is such utter drivel. Wow.

Kamshak 9y ago
Had a very similar reaction to this.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Friendly heads up: HN norms are that you simply upvote, instead of replying with a comment that basically boils down to "I agree" and no other info.
justonepost 9y ago
These are fair comments, however I think it's reasonable to say that we need more automation in the home and personal care. Health Care, IMHO, should be solved by AI and Big Data. I'm a free market person and I believe if the government tried to legislate this, it would screw it up. Rather it should try to open the way for the private industry to create AI based health care solutions. I'd also like to see character based communities with minimal basic income. Ie, your economic output is not relevant, but rather your character. How kind you are to others, how passionate you are about your talents, how independent you are about looking after yourself. I think this is the real solution to poverty in a world of increased automation. I know some people want UBI without strings attached, but my feeling is that without some kind of purpose (even a non economic one) mental health issues will increase.

Corence 9y ago

Second, we can bring what is known as differentiated education — based on the idea that students master skills in different ways and at different speeds — to every student in the country. A 2013 study by the National Institutes of Health found that nearly 40 percent of medical students held a strong preference for one mode of learning: Some were listeners; others were visual learners; still others learned best by doing. This study was a 100 person survey with no experimental evidence to back up people's beliefs. I've been working with educators for a while, and they've said that "learning styles" are just a myth with no solid evidence. All this survey says is that people think they learn best via one method, but people are notoriously bad at knowing what is an effective way of learning. In surveys people overvalue the "intensity" of a learning experience [1], which makes them think things like a 3-week bootcamp are more effective, when really spaced repetition is a better use of time. At least in the US, there are many easier ways we could improve our education methods before resorting to ML-driven customization. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9854.full http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9854.full

gowld 9y ago
> "learning styles" are just a myth with no solid evidence. > when really spaced repetition is a better use of time. So, which is it?
- Kalium 9y ago
  I believe the comment you are responding to would say "both". The learning styles to which they refer is the notion that different people learn better through visual or audio or hands-on experience. Spaced repetition versus intensive study is a different question, one of practice and time use, that doesn't address the question or value of "style". At least, that's how I understand it. As a casual interpreter of someone else's comment, I could of course be wildly wrong.
TheLegace 9y ago
I don't really have experimental data to back this up. But after struggling for my entire life until recently with learning this is the experience I have had studying for my last course(after a decade of struggling to study). I use to write everything down, it was the only way to retain whatever little information that I was capable of retaining. I never had enough confidence to NOT write everything. Realizing that all my abilities were impaired because of improper cognitive development. I decided to start from scratch, having nothing developed and picking one area that I was suited to. I have been practicing reciting rap lyrics of Eminem and Nas(not really for any reason, it was just fun). What I realized is that now my ability to recall information was significantly improved at least from a verbal learning style perspective. And it only took a few months develop. While studying for my final I went back to my old habits of writing every single detail down and realizing I will never have enough time to write it all down. So I started reciting knowledge the same way I would recite rap lyrics and I retained EVERYTHING. I have never studied so little, yet I aced my exam got an A in the course and was proud. Moral of the story is that people are different, and while most people may learn from one method, it doesn't mean they will have that capability developed at the time they need it. So they have to learn to adapt with what is available to them. edit: I will add that again poverty is the source of all this. My parents grew up in severe poverty and never were able to develop these skills properly and I had to suffer because of that.

dang 9y ago

Despite the consensus that the article is pretty bad, the discussion here is pretty good (edit: or at least was to begin with). For a hot-contro submission, that's rare. So instead of downweighting the post itself, I'm going to leave it unpenalized except for a question mark of protest in the title.

undoware 9y ago

Good lord. This comment of mine is probably going to get deprecated down to -1 and beyond, but it needs saying anyway: We already have a perfectly good technology for combatting poverty. It's called socialism. How many people read this article on the way to work, on their expensive new Christmas phones, absentmindedly stepping over homeless people they only semi-see. It's not the tech that's the problem. It's us. All of us. Shape up and start giving your resources away. If you need specific recommendations, ask.

anonemouse145 9y ago
How do homeless fare is socialist nations? Hint: You might want to start looking in the mass graves. (See also: The Scandinavian countries repeatedly having press conferences to say no, we are not socialist.)
- ttonkytonk 9y ago
  That's because they combine the welfare state with free market capitalism, known as the "Nordic Model".

Shivetya 9y ago

all your big Data A.I. matching of people to jobs won't amount to much because lack of mobility keeps people in areas where there are no jobs. I am very sure many unemployed would love to work if they could be where the job is and be where it is I mean in the same town, something they could drive or bus to.

rangersanger 9y ago

AI will far more likely power a new war on the poor than power a war to fight poverty. Through new ways to discriminate in lending/housing (1), and new ways to discriminate in hiring (2), new ways to discriminate in policing (3.) AI will be no boon to the poor. It will be a new tool for the wealthy to use math as smoke screen for practices they have used for centuries to keep the poor poor and the rich rich. 1)https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai-could-resurrect-a-racist-housing-policy https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai-could-r... & https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is-artificial-intelligence-a-threat-to-fair-lending https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is-artificial-intelligen... 2)http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2112786/updated-laws-needed-hong-kong-can-embrace-artificial http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2112786/u... 3) https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

saas_co_de 9y ago
I am not sure exactly how you would fight a "war on poverty" without also fighting a "war on the poor." This is some "we are going to invade your country and force you to be free" level Orwellian thinking.
- rangersanger 9y ago
  By helping the poor out of poverty instead of strengthening the mechanisms that put them there to keep them there. I'm not sure how exactly that's Orwellian thinking, please explain.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mLuby 9y ago
    "War is Welfare" is fairly Orwellian.
- maze-le 9y ago
  That is because the "war on ..."-metaphors are pretty much bullshit talk. If you want to look like a strong person, that takes an issue seriously, declare a war on a concept... Its a simple propaganda technique, aimed at people, that are easily impressed by bellicose statements. But it wears off quickly. Especially if one considers how other "wars on concepts" are going (war on drugs, war on terror)

Havoc 9y ago

As they say, the cleverest minds are too busy trying to optimise ad clicks.

balance_factor 9y ago

There are two sides in every war, and in the war on poverty, those fighting to create and preserve poverty currently hold most of the cards. Harken back to 2000 and let us read the business press...I will pick one article by example ( http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ )...what does the article say? "Joblessness at 30-year low...The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in April, the government reported Friday, as worker-starved companies raised wages and went on a hiring spree that created 340,000 new jobs. But the good news for workers on Main Street sparked fears on Wall Street" What? Workers looking for a job being more easily able to get a job is something that sparks fear on Wall Street ? "Still, the markets took the data in stride...The markets harbor no doubts of the Fed's concerns over labor market tightness." Both "the markets" and "the Fed" are concerned that so many people are employed? Basically this CNNfn article is saying, correctly, that Americans wanting a job being able to get a job is something that is feared by Wall Street, "markets", The Fed etc., not something that is desired. As that is the way the system is set up, and this is not the only business press article or pronouncement of that time saying this, one has to be skeptical of the desire for a "war on poverty". Because as it says, Wall Street, "the markets", The Fed and most of the powers that be are deathly afraid of that happening. They are in the business of preserving poverty, and creating it when necessary. Of course, this article was written by a corporation owned by people who feel this way. So this is about as blunt an explanation as you're going to get from them, or the mass media, which is completely owned and controlled by them. For a clearer explanation of all of this from a source independent of that, you might try consulting a source such as this - https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-stagnation https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...

lsc 9y ago

Eh, if jobs are going away, we need more jobs more than we need matchmaking for existing jobs. I can tell you from personal experience that there is a huge difference between working when there are more jobs than qualified workers and working when there are more qualified workers than jobs, and the humane way to balance that equation in favor of us workers is to create more jobs. (It is interesting, though, because who is qualified is a subjective thing; either to the whims of a human manager, or whatever hidden statistical correlation the ML algorithm found. Right now, my impression is that standards are much higher for new grads than when I broke into the industry, and much lower for the higher end jobs that I now compete for.) Which isn't to say that the matchmaking problem isn't difficult or important or interesting, but it's certainly not the whole of the problem. (Also, where I am, my employer pays a rather large cut of what I earn to the matchmaker. like 30% though it varies a lot, as far as I can tell. Rather more than I pay in rent. At my end of the market, my marginal dollars are devalued to the point where I'm still making a really good living on my 70%... but if I was making a lot less, that 30% could really matter. From that perspective, inserting a matchmaker into the low end might contribute to the further impoverishment of the poor.)

kevin_b_er 9y ago

I doubt it will help to combat poverty. It will be used as a tool by the rich to extract more money and increase poverty. Who will wield these AI tools that is supposed to be used to fight poverty? Corporations are for-profit and a corporate sociopath cannot be concerned about limiting profit to help the poor. They'll want to use AI as a new tool to increase profits. This will come at the expense of the human populace at large. My government in the United States of America is rapidly falling to greed. Corporations only act nominally concerned about the poor as a PR act to prevent the rage of the populace from using government against them. Since my government is even further down the slide into plutocracy than ever before, this government will neither stop the greed-based corporate use of AI nor will it use it to help the poor, because there's no money for their rich patrons in helping the poor. Even you want this magic AI tech to help the poor, who will do it? Where will you get the data in the first place to feed into this A.I. and Big Data magic machine? I argue the two sources above will not be a help in so far as they might threaten the greed they exhibit.

colordrops 9y ago

Is it so far fetched that perhaps the existence of so much poverty is intentional, or at least caused by human action and inaction? The power structures have a lot directly and indirectly invested in keeping the common man down. With current technology and productivity, humans should be capable of lifting even 20 billion people out of poverty but market inefficiencies caused by corporate greed and border controls reduce that capability by orders of magnitude.

Top19 9y ago

What this article describes is a terrible, confused, scary nightmare. From the very first picture that begins the article on-down, Elizabeth Mason advocates an absolutely frightening system that is made even more scary by how she comes through as genuinely/naively believing in it all. > Big data promises something closer to an unbiased, ideology-free evaluation of the effectiveness of these social programs. We could come closer to the vision of a meritocratic, technocratic society that politicians from both parties at state and local levels — those closest to the practical problems their constituents face — have begun to embrace. First, meritocracy was first brought up as a joke by the author who coined the term. Second, who is advocating for this “technocratic vision” short of Silicon Valley CEOs? This “vision” of centralized, unbiased analysis by top-notch planners was what we had in Vietnam or with GOSPLAN in the USSR, not what we need now. Third, AI works fast, which means even if it’s 75% less “ideological” or whatever, it’s rate of speed is so fast that it will magnify any and all biases that might be lurking inside. To imagine that it is unbiased is crazy, let alone to think that it wouldn’t be used to some horrible malevolent end (cough China cough). This article made me sick, but it was so uplifting and wonderful to see all the other negative reactions on here and that this is not representative of HN.

pasbesoin 9y ago

I'm bad for only having read the headline, so far. But the only way I see this playing out, is in a bad way, i.e. war on the impoverished. Human history has a long and fairly consistent set of precedents. More and more, the domestic U.S. from 1945 - circa 1980, appears to be the exception rather than the rule. (An exception not equally shared and also purchased at the price of some populations abroad, e.g. with respect to natural resource extraction.)

yakitori 9y ago

Rather than focusing on poverty, I wonder if we should be focusing on wealth disparity/inequality instead. It seems like reduction of poverty is being used to distract from and even justify the increased wealth inequality. Reducing poverty is a noble goal but the scary systematic problem to me is the ever growing concentration of wealth amongst a tiny elite and the decline of the middle class. And I don't see how AI/machine learning + big data can decrease wealth inequality when a small few control the data and the AI.

dashoffset 9y ago
I fail to see how wealth inequality is a problem worse than poverty. I also fail to see why we can't try to fix both poverty and inequality at the same time.

akeck 9y ago

Maybe. It’s also possible that self-interested parties will use AI to further disenfranchise the poor. For example black box denial of access to a checking account into perpetuity due to an AI-driven risk score.

partycoder 9y ago

Well, so far AI is being used to squeeze more money from people. Advertising, pricing, getting people to spend more time, etc.

robotresearcher 9y ago
And on the other hand: spam filtering, web search, reducing power consumption in data centres, reading MRI images, etc. Good things.
- partycoder 9y ago
  We all benefit from these products and services, but at a cost that we do not always understand.

metafrag 9y ago

It would be awesome if people stopped talking about the alleviation of societal ills by saying that people will "go to war" on them. Poverty isn't something you war on. Poverty's something people are lifted out of.

skc 9y ago

The only way this can succeed is if it can be proven that the rich and powerful can become even more rich and powerful through the reduction of poverty.

myaso 9y ago

This is load of reasonable sounding horseshit. This tech is excellent at extracting every drop of potential value that flows through organization boundaries and little else (self driving cars aren't reality yet, when my mother is in a self driving car my opinion will change) The thought of an online system that can do this being bolted onto government IT systems on this scale is hilarious, the bottleneck here isn't knowledge of AI or deep learning. It is an idealistic future that fails to take into account all the shit it will have to be built upon. I'll interpert the title in it's literally sense -- another way for the poor to get fucked over by something they don't understand!