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At least there won't be any gender/race bias.
by thefounder 8y ago
At least there won't be any gender/race bias.
- sagebird 8y agoNot necessarily. If it fired people who listen to rap music while they worked, would it be racist? Some might argue— no— because it also fired white people who listen to rap. But it would be a rather obvious discriminatory practice. Now we must use our imaginations to consider less direct examples of the same phenomenon. For what it’s worth, I have no reason to believe that amazon is not an equal opportunity human soul extraction and disposal system.
- dx034 8y agoIt fired by the worker's output. Any racial bias in there is likely due to a deeper racial inequality (e.g. differences in health care access which can lead to worse performance) rather than the algorithm itself.
- arkitaip 8y agoAlgos tend to inherit the biases of their developers. Let's say you're a woman on your period and that the bleeding, cramps and pain can get severe. You might need to visit the rest room or maybe take a few more pauses than the modeled average, that happens to be based on men, during certain days. The algorithm that is about to fire you doesn't factor in these issues when it decides to fire you for not meeting its performance quota.
- dx034 8y agoThe example you describe inherits the bias of the sample group, not the developer. A woman comparing individual performance with averages might notice monthly fluctuations rather than a man, but it doesn't mean they'd always recognize it or even look for it.
- visarga 8y agoThe algorithm should have average figures specific to all relevant factors: age, sex, race, nationality, immigration status, not a one-fits all approach. But it's a horrible idea in the first place.
- sagebird 8y agoHahaha, wow -- full circle, this inadvertently arrives back at a racist system it seeks to counteract! For example, if it averages that hispanics are 1.6 times faster than the average worker at sorting boxes, does that mean it should fire a hispanic who is outperforming a white co-worker because adjusting for averages, that individual is 'under-performing'?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 8y agoI get your point, but I’m going to do a “well actually” anyway.... The majority of people who buy rap are White. https://genius.com/discussions/281920-The-majority-of-hip-hop-listeners-are-white https://genius.com/discussions/281920-The-majority-of-hip-ho...
- sagebird 8y agoInteresting as that may be, I'll raise you: discrimination is best measured as a deviation between a selected ratio and a population ratio. If you don't account for that, then silly things happen, like all heat maps turn into population maps, etc.
- hoseja 8y agoHow does that say anything about people who listen to rap, as opposed about people who purchase music?
- scarface74 8y agoPeople are buying music and not listening to it? Right now, the top steaming artist is Drake.
- thefounder 8y agoThe software will track only the work done. Sometimes I would really want to use a computer system rather to deal with people.
- regularfry 8y agoHow about workers who need more toilet breaks one week in four?
- thefounder 8y agoWe can always add more features.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoDepends on who inputs to the system - a few years ago I overheard a UK amazon worker discussing with a mate how a lot of the supervisory posts had been captured by a particular group and they played favourites. Similar to the problem Ford had at Dagenham which was BAME workers excluded from some higher paying jobs.
- hoseja 8y agoUntil it turns out this is incredibly sexist/racist by the current climate and "reverse" bias gets added to the software.
- GoodJokes 8y agoSurely you have read about how algorithms take in the current status quo world (read racist and sexist world) and maintain it. People taking these jobs often have to take them due to the structural inequities in our society. This exacerbates gender and race bias.
- D-Coder 8y agoCan a manager edit the statistics to account for tracking errors, special cases, etc? If so, can a manager edit the statistics to account for employees of the wrong religion, sexual status, etc?