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It seems lately I see an article like this about once a week - "an algorithm did it" and 1 person's livelihood in shambles, with said person needing to prove th
by tropdrop 8y ago
It seems lately I see an article like this about once a week - "an algorithm did it" and 1 person's livelihood in shambles, with said person needing to prove they're real/not a criminal/not violating policies/not fired/ etc.
Just off the top of my head -
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
We need to think critically about how to propel legislative action requiring every company/organization using machine learning to have a human-in-the-loop that can override the mistake. It doesn't matter how good an algorithm is - thanks to the nature of probability and a large enough sample size, it will always make a mistake. The onus to correct that mistake should not fall to the victim.
Currently, if, say, one's Google's account is suspended because of a mistake, there seems to be no recourse for a victim except to stir up a large enough PR scandal. In essence - a "guilty until proven innocent" approach. Our courts don't work that way and neither should the closure of our accounts (which are, increasingly, our livelihoods).
- DanAndersen 8y agoThis is the danger of the "law is just code" mindset of companies interacting with customers/clients. In the rush to automate and process-ize interactions with "mere humans" under a Great Algorithm, they forget that effective law and processes relies not on kafkaesque bureaucracies following flowcharts blindly, but by ensuring that human judgment is kept in the loop. Beware the rise of the techno-bureaucracy, as it is only a low-dimensional lossy encoding of what we actually want.