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(Disclaimer: I am an Amazon employee sharing his own experience, but do not speak in any official capacity for Amazon. I don't know anything about the system me
by jkingsbery 8y ago
(Disclaimer: I am an Amazon employee sharing his own experience, but do not speak in any official capacity for Amazon. I don't know anything about the system mentioned in this article.)
I am a frequent interviewer for engineering roles at Amazon. As part of the interview training and other forums, we often discuss the importance of removing bias, looking out for unconscious bias, and so on. The recruiters I know at Amazon all take reaching out to historically under-represented groups seriously.
I don't know anything about the system described in the article (even that we had such a system), but if it was introducing bias I'm glad it's being shelved. Hopefully this article doesn't discourage people from applying to work at Amazon - I've found it a good place to work.
To say something about the AI/ML aspect of the article: I think as engineers our instinct is "Here's some data that's been classified for me, I can use ML/AI on it!" without thinking through all that follows, including doing quality assurance. I think a lot of focus in ML (at least in what I've read) has been on generating models, and not nearly enough focus has been on generating models that interpretable (i.e., give a reason along with a classification).
- darawk 8y agoIt seems like they did think it through, though? And that's why it's being shelved. I don't really see what the story is here. It seems like the whole process worked exactly as it should - Amazon tried something, it had some unintended consequences, they caught it, and shelved it.
- weliketocode 8y agoAgreed. There is no story here.
- hannasanarion 8y agoThe story is, some ML researchers did their job properly and detected ethical issues before they became a problem. That's more rare than you'd think.
- rrcaptain 8y agoYes. Software engineers taking ethics seriously and not letting technical enthusiasm blind them is news, not normality.
- weliketocode 8y agoI like the counterpoint, but it's not clear that the ML researchers were the ones who pulled the plug on the project.