> Why on earth would we expect AI descision making to display a lack of prejudice when human decision making is suffused with it.
Particularly when we consider what we mean by prejudice, which is presumably something like Making a decision on grounds which we deem it important to ignore. This is a very complex concept. It's a function of society, and changes with society. It's not something with a rigorous definition.
Obvious example: reasonable modern people know it's indefensible to make an engineering hiring decision on the grounds of ethnicity, regardless of whether there are any correlations associated with ethnicity. This is even enshrined in law in many countries.
To make a decision on the grounds of someone's qualifications and job experience, however, does not count as prejudice.
We should expect a machine learning system to act as a correlation-seeker (that is after all what it is designed to do), without a nuanced understanding of what prejudice means.
We've seen this issue crop up in the context of an AI having a say in parole decisions. [0] also relevant discussion at [1]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/29/3-steps-...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13156153
Particularly when we consider what we mean by prejudice, which is presumably something like Making a decision on grounds which we deem it important to ignore. This is a very complex concept. It's a function of society, and changes with society. It's not something with a rigorous definition.
Obvious example: reasonable modern people know it's indefensible to make an engineering hiring decision on the grounds of ethnicity, regardless of whether there are any correlations associated with ethnicity. This is even enshrined in law in many countries.
To make a decision on the grounds of someone's qualifications and job experience, however, does not count as prejudice.
We should expect a machine learning system to act as a correlation-seeker (that is after all what it is designed to do), without a nuanced understanding of what prejudice means.
We've seen this issue crop up in the context of an AI having a say in parole decisions. [0] also relevant discussion at [1]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/29/3-steps-...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13156153