5 ms·

The EU is proposing to regulate the application of certain techniques to certain fields. There is too much vagueness in those definitions but the authors shoul

by ridaj 5y ago

The EU is proposing to regulate the application of certain techniques to certain fields. There is too much vagueness in those definitions but the authors should pause to think about what else is regulating the ethics of using ML or even just basic statistical modeling to public service. What if your car insurance was more expensive because your last name was associated with an ethnicity that happens to have more car accidents than others? What if your sentence at a public trial was determined by an algorithm that did the same? Those things we wouldn't consider as fair, and we know that the blind application of ML to socially meaningful tasks leads exactly to these kinds of problems. I'm not sure what the author's better solution is, they just seen to be flailing about... If the ML community can't get its shit together and address fairness and ethics generally as diligently as they do precision and recall, I'm afraid that poorly-written regulations will be coming their way with a ton of popular support behind them. Misguided as experts might think that those regulations are, they're the ones playing with fire in the first place.

ativzzz 5y ago
> What if your car insurance was more expensive because your last name was associated with an ethnicity that happens to have more car accidents than others? But why is it fair to charge men more than women? AFAIK car insurance is more expensive for men
- ridaj 5y ago
  Whether consideration of gender should be allowed in setting auto insurance rates is indeed the subject of debate. It seems to be allowed in most US states but illegal in the EU https://www.investopedia.com/gender-and-insurance-costs-5114126 https://www.investopedia.com/gender-and-insurance-costs-5114... Back to the point of regulation, the fact that we're able to have a conversation about the factors that are/aren't allowed to be taken into account relies on the pricing model being relatively transparent about its inputs. Unrestricted machine learning leads to better predictions but often at the expense of transparency about what exactly is going on. If you feed first and last names into a model for example, it might learn things that correlate very closely with ethnicity

by ridaj 5y ago

ativzzz 5y ago

> What if your car insurance was more expensive because your last name was associated with an ethnicity that happens to have more car accidents than others? But why is it fair to charge men more than women? AFAIK car insurance is more expensive for men

ridaj 5y ago
Whether consideration of gender should be allowed in setting auto insurance rates is indeed the subject of debate. It seems to be allowed in most US states but illegal in the EU https://www.investopedia.com/gender-and-insurance-costs-5114126 https://www.investopedia.com/gender-and-insurance-costs-5114... Back to the point of regulation, the fact that we're able to have a conversation about the factors that are/aren't allowed to be taken into account relies on the pricing model being relatively transparent about its inputs. Unrestricted machine learning leads to better predictions but often at the expense of transparency about what exactly is going on. If you feed first and last names into a model for example, it might learn things that correlate very closely with ethnicity