As a fellow practitioner, I entirely agree. Actually, reading this article made something click for me regarding the oft discussed and denigrated “bias in AI” always brought up in discussions of the “ethics of AI”: there is no bias problem in the algorithms of AI.
AI algorithms _need_ bias to work. This is the bias-variance trade off: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias–variance_tradeoff
The problem is having the _correct_ bias. If there are physiological differences in a disease between men and women and you have a good dataset, the bias in that dataset is the bias of “people with this disease”. If there is no such well-balanced dataset, what is being revealed is a pre-existing harmful bias in the medicinal field of sample bias in studies.
If anything, we should be thankful that the algorithms used in AI, based on statistical theory that has carefully been developed over decades to be objective, is revealing these problems in the datasets we have been using to frame our understanding of real issues.
Next up, the hard part: eliminating our dataset biases and letting statistical learning theory and friends do what they have been designed to do and can do well.
AI algorithms _need_ bias to work. This is the bias-variance trade off: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias–variance_tradeoff
The problem is having the _correct_ bias. If there are physiological differences in a disease between men and women and you have a good dataset, the bias in that dataset is the bias of “people with this disease”. If there is no such well-balanced dataset, what is being revealed is a pre-existing harmful bias in the medicinal field of sample bias in studies.
If anything, we should be thankful that the algorithms used in AI, based on statistical theory that has carefully been developed over decades to be objective, is revealing these problems in the datasets we have been using to frame our understanding of real issues.
Next up, the hard part: eliminating our dataset biases and letting statistical learning theory and friends do what they have been designed to do and can do well.