> that criminals are under-evolved, subhuman beasts This has everything to do with common attitudes. Ask any person about what kind of person does the kind of

> that criminals are under-evolved, subhuman beasts This has everything to do with common attitudes. Ask any person about what kind of person does the kind of crime or moral aberration they are most passionate about and you'll get a similar response. People can't imagine that criminals might have had some understandable train of thought prior to committing a crime; or worse that they may have done exactly the same thing in their shoes. > These algorithms reportedly make false accusations against students with disabilities who move their faces and hands in atypical ways, and Black students have indicated that they have been required to shine bright lights in their faces so as to have their features detected at all. Warning: I will be using the term police quite broadly here, but it's anyone involved in any kind of policing or detective activity. Any algorithm used in policing that produces false negatives needs to be retired until it can be proven they can be used provably equally on people, which I suspect is never. The problem is that most people believe that policing should be more efficient. More efficient police work means violating your privacy, breaking algorithms, and using lazy surveillance and data collection. If you want your freedoms intact then good old fashioned police and detective work needs to be just that; the police need to be smarter, not have smarter tools. > Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw, in that using pictures of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who were cleared, introduces a statistical bias that skews the results. They said they were “deeply baffled” at the public outrage in reaction to a study that was intended “for pure academic discussions,” which also suggests an unawareness that their work’s flaws go beyond sloppy statistics. Absolutely a fair criticism. I'm surprised anyone was baffled that the criminal justice system is highly flawed, other than some mathematicians who lead quite prestigious lives. I've long thought it's pretty suspect that there's a morality bar forming (or that has formed) in programming. A force beyond laws can make you unhireable, what a precedent! Really, I find the idea that we might deny entry to programming even for convicted felons that have served their time problematic. Their insights might be quite useful here. Edit: Changed "Americans" to "people"