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Your remark on the racial bias is what also came to my mind immediately. It would only be fair if the percentage of mugshots that are of people of color in thei

Your remark on the racial bias is what also came to my mind immediately. It would only be fair if the percentage of mugshots that are of people of color in their 25k sample was published.

klyrs 6y ago
This isn't about being fair to the algorithm, it's about being fair to the people subject to the algorithm's judgement
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Which is a distorted discussion already. Instead of questioning the benefit of the technology for policing on the whole it is already shifted to the issues of bias. In the end the algorithm and the data will of course have bias in some form but that isn't even important at that point. Yay, we have an algorithm judging people, but is it fair to Canadians? Completely off...
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    This isn't distorting the discussion at all. From the point of view of the ACLU, new technology should only be adopted by policing if it can be proven to not perpetuate or exacerbate existing problems of bias, which IMO is a totally reasonable position. We don't accept the "move fast, break things" ethos in fields like aviation, for example, and if we only listened to technologists, society would be too cavalier about collateral damage affecting innocent people. One could argue that society is already too cavalier about this.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      I disagree because you already anticipate large scale deployment with that argument.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        Facial recognition AI products were already being sold to police departments and customs agencies. Large scale deployment is in the process of happening. Maybe not at your specific agency, but the ACLU is a national organization, and in their eyes one additional false positive caused by increased efficiency is one too many.
petre 6y ago
Does it matter? More than half of the world's population are people of color.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  It matters for the ACLU because it's an American organization focusing on American injustices; in the US, 73% of people are white, 12.7 are black, and 17.6% hispanic. You're using the strawman and whataboutism logical fallacies, but you're not actually making a point.
  - daun 6y ago
    Your statistics are misleading. You put hispanics in twice, since the non-hispanic white population of the United States is around 60%.
tripzilch 6y ago
Shouldn't matter. What we really want is a classifier that does not take skin colour (or ethnicity) into consideration as a feature. I know how ML works but I believe we should demand better from these technologies than the limits of our own biases. Right now, this machine learning algorithm is apparently about as smart as a bigot arguing "yea but percentages show that crime is in fact higher among blacks!". It mainly shows how systemic the racism is, that a dumb ML algo picks up on it. This is not solved by showing the bigot less statistics about black crime, but by showing them how to pull their head out of their ass. We should expect no less from our ML technologies, otherwise you'll keep running behind the facts, always fixing errors after they have been learned and made. Yeah that is hard and we have no idea how to approach it. But the alternative appears to be writing computer programs with the reasoning skills of a racist cop.

Your remark on the racial bias is what also came to my mind immediately. It would only be fair if the percentage of mugshots that are of people of color in their 25k sample was published.

klyrs 6y ago

This isn't about being fair to the algorithm, it's about being fair to the people subject to the algorithm's judgement

raxxorrax 6y ago
Which is a distorted discussion already. Instead of questioning the benefit of the technology for policing on the whole it is already shifted to the issues of bias. In the end the algorithm and the data will of course have bias in some form but that isn't even important at that point. Yay, we have an algorithm judging people, but is it fair to Canadians? Completely off...
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  This isn't distorting the discussion at all. From the point of view of the ACLU, new technology should only be adopted by policing if it can be proven to not perpetuate or exacerbate existing problems of bias, which IMO is a totally reasonable position. We don't accept the "move fast, break things" ethos in fields like aviation, for example, and if we only listened to technologists, society would be too cavalier about collateral damage affecting innocent people. One could argue that society is already too cavalier about this.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I disagree because you already anticipate large scale deployment with that argument.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Facial recognition AI products were already being sold to police departments and customs agencies. Large scale deployment is in the process of happening. Maybe not at your specific agency, but the ACLU is a national organization, and in their eyes one additional false positive caused by increased efficiency is one too many.

petre 6y ago

Does it matter? More than half of the world's population are people of color.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It matters for the ACLU because it's an American organization focusing on American injustices; in the US, 73% of people are white, 12.7 are black, and 17.6% hispanic. You're using the strawman and whataboutism logical fallacies, but you're not actually making a point.
- daun 6y ago
  Your statistics are misleading. You put hispanics in twice, since the non-hispanic white population of the United States is around 60%.

tripzilch 6y ago

Shouldn't matter. What we really want is a classifier that does not take skin colour (or ethnicity) into consideration as a feature. I know how ML works but I believe we should demand better from these technologies than the limits of our own biases. Right now, this machine learning algorithm is apparently about as smart as a bigot arguing "yea but percentages show that crime is in fact higher among blacks!". It mainly shows how systemic the racism is, that a dumb ML algo picks up on it. This is not solved by showing the bigot less statistics about black crime, but by showing them how to pull their head out of their ass. We should expect no less from our ML technologies, otherwise you'll keep running behind the facts, always fixing errors after they have been learned and made. Yeah that is hard and we have no idea how to approach it. But the alternative appears to be writing computer programs with the reasoning skills of a racist cop.