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FaustusC t1_ixe3oaj wrote

Reply to comment by notkevinjohn in The Ethics of Policing Algorithms by ADefiniteDescription

100%, spot on.

People are acting like this AI would only speculate off that past history and not constantly update the model.

You could literally feed in historical data that says there's only crime in neighborhood A despite the opposite being true and the AI would correct the issue within a few cycles as you said. The big thing here is these prediction models learn and they only learn off of input. If everything but the location & type of crime was scrubbed from the data, literally no demographic information at all, the results would come out the same.

I think even philosophically we're at a point where we can't even discuss that the data might just be data without people crying foul and it disgusts me. Racism by low expectations is still racism. I grew up in a very, very shitty neighborhood B. I've also lived in Neighborhood As. I can't say A was completely without incident, but comparing the two even off of my anecdotal experiences is night and Day.

I think the biggest incident in A was someone complaining about Horse droppings on the beach and some teens setting a dumpster on fire.

B had someone get shot. Completely anecdotal but still relevant.

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notkevinjohn t1_ixe572q wrote

As I've pointed our elsewhere in the thread, I think a lot of people aren't distinguishing between an explicit algorithm, and a machine learning algorithm. I think people in this thread are looking at algorithms as a black box, where you put data in, something incomprehensible happens, and then police go and arrest people. When you have machine learning, it's a non-deterministic process where even the programmer who built the system can't work it backward and say 'this person was arrested because of these inputs to the system.' But there are tons of algorithms that could be developed where the programmer can tell you EXACTLY which inputs lead to a particular result, and the transparency of these algorithms could vastly exceed the transparency of machine learning, and even exceed the transparency of our current human-driven system.

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FaustusC t1_ixe5mvt wrote

Tbh, I don't think most of the people even vaguely understand the difference but are thrilled at the opportunity to morally grandstand against a supposed injustice.

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