Hopefully less than human bias. I was in a CVS and a black teenager came in and was vigorously trying to get the cashiers attention. Eventually he was like “YO” and she looked up and he showed her his soda and told her he was bringing it into the store, so that when he left she wouldn’t think he had stolen it. I can’t imagine having to live life under such perpetual assumption of wrongdoing.

I know what you're saying, but that may not be the best example. I'm white, but I've trained my children a couple of times now that they should never bring anything into a store that the store sells, white kids or not. Of course the store has to assume you're stealing it if you walk back out with it and visibly did not pay. A reasonable person (in the legal sense) is going to put the burden of proof on you to prove you had it when you walked in.

I can say that myself, on hot days, often go into stores, grab a drink, drink the entire thing while doing the rest of my shopping, and pay for the empty bottle when I leave. My wife was horrified when she saw this behavior, and made me stop when we had kids to not set an example for them (I now do it only when I’m not with the kids), but not once (in at least 100 instances) has anyone ever questioned me on it. Contrast my experience to whatever experiences that kid had to make him yell to a cashier until she acknowledged his drink.

Edit: to people wondering why I do this, I can only say that it’s something that I never even thought of as weird. That’s what growing up rich can do you.

> drink the entire thing while doing the rest of my shopping, and pay for the empty bottle when I leave

I have a friend that does the same thing and it just seems really weird to me.

My groceries aren't mine until I've paid for them. And also, as a person with not always a lot of money I sometimes (very rarely, but still) find that I don't have enough money for the things I wanted to buy. What if I'd started consuming the goods, got to the till and couldn't pay?

If I needed to drink first I'd buy the drink first, drink it, and then proceed with the remainder of the shopping.

Anyway, people can do what they want. I'm not going to berate anyone for this. But I still think it's really weird.

I fully agree with you and recognize that a person can only become the way I am (and doesn’t necessarily) by growing up in a privileged environment where store owners are always happy to see you and your family and you have never been questioned by anyone.

If you feel that “groceries aren't mine until I've paid for them,” then how do you ever eat at a restaurant?

Hmm, touché :)

I think a restaurant is different though because that is explicitly how it works (eat first then pay).

To take your comparison further, what would happen if you sat down in a grocery store and started consuming hundreds of dollars worth of food and drink? I think it would raise a lot of eyebrows, and the employees would probably confront you. So there is a difference.

Furthermore, in a restaurant you place an order and they serve you, and from a legal perspective (IANAL) there might be something about some sort of implicit contract that you will pay them. Whereas with a grocery store you are not allowed to remove the items from the store until you've paid for them. And I feel like consuming the items inside of the store is sort of analogous to removing them from the store.

When I was young, I avoided restaurants because of exactly this! Always preferred cafes/fast-food places where you pay first. It just didn't make logical sense to me. I've grown out of it now obviously... :P

Doesn’t make sense. Paying beforehand is customary at grocery stores, not at restaurants.

I've never had unpaid-for groceries in a restaurant.

That may feel weird to some people (it does to me, for instance), but it's not in the same category of events. You paid for it. Rationally, as long as you know you're good for it, there's nothing massively wrong with it. I say it "feels" weird precisely because I know rationally it isn't wrong, or is so little wrong it doesn't matter much. (I mean, I've been in situations where it turns out I ate at a restaurant but didn't have my wallet, and I had to go make it right. That sort of thing happens. If you really get down to it, yeah, sure, it's wrong, but we can't run a society of human beings if we start bring in the legal system or something for all those things.)

I would also add that if the store owner came up to you and challenged you to please pay for that right now, you're obligated to do so. Considered as a whole, it's not a good idea for someone to do that over a bottle of soda for all kinds of reasons, but I'd say the right still is essentially there.

Also if I do take something in I make sure I have a receipt for it as well as carry it in the store bag, but most of the time, if I’m in s car, put my things in the car. If transit, receipt and store bag to avoid scrutiny.

>Hopefully less than human bias...

Well you can hope, but it's made by humans, so I wouldn't count on it.

I mean the systems are programmed by humans right, why wouldn’t they have some of our biases? Not to mention once they’re made it gives everyone the excuse to say “oh sorry for bugging you I wasn’t being racist but my store’s AI said you were going to steal”

That guy's parents had a talk with him.

The thing with machine learning systems is that we can't always know what specific characteristics or behaviours they have learned to respond to. All we know is that they have associated some characteristics of shoppers as indicating a high likelihood of imminently engaging in theft, but we might not be able to un-pick what those characteristics or behaviours are from the neural net weightings.

I think a potential risk here is from small initial sample sizes. Here's a thought experiment. A system like this is set up and runs successfully for some time. A person with some distinctive characteristic enters the store and steals something and is caught. The system learns that so far 100% of people with that characteristic stole. Next time it detects that characteristic, it flags that person and they're ejected from the store. The system will never learn that this characteristic can be benign, because from now on it will be excluded from it's data set.

That's a bit of an artificial example, making assumptions about how the system might work, but something along those lines could be a potential failure mode, and we might never know what that characteristic is because the system can't express the reasons for it's decision in a meaningful way.

Exactly, profiling.

So profiling in and of itself isn’t automatically bad. It’s bad if it uses illegal methods , characteristics to assign weight to a profile.

You can’t say if [some race] then that. But you can use other things (are they loitering, barefoot, poor hygiene, has sunglasses, truckers cap, pulls over hoodie on entering, have a decoy, etc)

So "legal" is the threshold for "bad"? I disagree.

If the proportion of white shoplifters and black shoplifters being caught is different, AI will just scale up that disparity. If reality is biased, we should work to fix that: not make it more efficient.

I think if they want to target shoplifters, so long as their accuracy is within reasonable range of effectiveness, it’s okay. 90% of the Thai, 92% of AngloAmericans, 89% of Nigerians, 88% of South Americans, 87% of locals indeed processed were shoplifting, regardless of absolute numbers, this is okay.

I think your attitude is really, really dangerous, because it ignores the long term effects these kinds of things have on society. People don't even really understand how humans apply rules in biased ways - when you attache the words "AI", "Machine Learning", or "Statistics", even well educated people tend to just accept the magic truth telling black box at face value (for a small version of this effect, Google "precision bias").

To specifically address your point:

"so long as their accuracy is within reasonable range of effectiveness"

This is a far too narrow look at what accuracy means - that's why we usually look at sensitivity, specificity, false negative rate, and false positive rates, and why we break those rates up over important subgroups. To the example numbers you give, let's posit (without evidence) that your numbers are correct - they don't tell us what proportion of people visiting the store belong to each group (is the model just learning to identify ethnicity?), and they don't tell us what proportion of each group is really shoplifting.

In many areas (drug crimes come to mind), there's good evidence that different ethnic groups commit crimes at similar rates, but arrest rates are wildly, grotesquely disproportionate. Imagine that AI is applied to such a system - it learns, correctly, that black people are more likely to be arrested for particular crimes. It then targets black people, and the accuracy numbers look good on paper. In fact, because of the trust we have in technology, such a system might help normalize or justify this crazy preexisting disparity.

If you were building a statistical model to describe predictors of shoplifting, this kind of bias wouldn't make it past a cursory level of peer review. When you're slapping "AI" on a product and implementing it at a huge scale, nobody bats an eye.

I get the positive feedback loop issue. I’m saying if I’m looking at the data (which is blind a -it doesn’t classify people by ethnicity) but manually when looking at and labeling the data we find the above proportions as the effective proportions, then I think we’re okay.

> I’m saying if I’m looking at the data

My point is about the data generating mechanism - making inferences conditional on a bad selection procedure is a bad idea. It would be bad statistics, and it's bad ML. In this case, my argument is that it's also bad for society.

Nearly everything is correlated with race or protected social status. For instance, it is farcical to be able to target advertisements on Facebook Likes, but not on race. These systems will discriminate on racial proxies, and the question is if you are ok with that, not if those features happen to be legally allowed.

Ok but that’s like saying robberies are correlated with mobility. Sure, but that doesn’t mean we’re discriminating because they are mobile.

I do not follow you, so I think you do not follow me. Robbers or mobility are not protected classes.

Seniors are a protected class (age discrimination) just because they are old doesn’t mean when we find out that they’re seniors are going to discount them (so long as we’re not targeting “age”).

You're conflating morals with legality. The two are completely different concepts.

For example I can legally profile short people, but it isn't moral to do so. And I would rightfully be judged if I did so.

I don’t see why it would be immoral if empirically short people accounted for 75% of your shrinkage while being less than 50% of the shopping pop in your store.

Because you're treatment people differently based on something outside of their control. Just because you can justify why you'd want to act that way, in no way makes it any less wrong.

The problem is this a preposterous example, but let’s say we’re targeting kleptomaniacs. Is it immoral to target them, despite their propensity? I don’t see how.

We're talking about profiling people on physical characteristics outside of their control. Kleptomania is a behaviour, not a physical characteristic.

Asking if it is right to judge people based on their mental health is an entirely different topic than asking if we can judge people based on a physical characteristic they were born with and have no control over. Apples and oranges.

Right but to go back to the beginning, we shouldn’t target short people per se, but the behavior of shoplifters, if the shoplifters in fact end up being predominantly short people while not looking specifically at short people I think it’s not immoral.

But the learned behaviour will be short => likely a shoplifter. Short people who don't shoplift will have to deal with being suspected of shoplifting at a higher rate than the rest of society. You could say that's just a fact of life, a minor thing, but it's still a privilege to not be in that group. If you then belong to multiple of these groups (dark skin, poor neighborhood), you become a primary target without ever having any intention of doing anything illegal. It's not immoral per se, but it does not set the stage for a fair society.

It does add some unfairness I can see that, but I’m not sure it’d be permanent. Is it possible since short people are caught at a high rate this would deter the thieves who are also short and then through feedback the system would begin to target thieves who are also tall?

So if say, old white females who wear expensive clothes are more likely to shoplift, should we ignore that?

Yes, we should. As a society we've agreed that whatever benefits there may be from racial profiling aren't worth the harm.

It is when the quest for fairness goes too far. Predictive policing is close to this, and also causes strong reactions: complaining about negative feedback loops, but seemingly ignoring that these problem neighborhoods need more police attention, if we want to combat violent deaths and youth gangs.

Police has a limited capacity. I want that capacity, paid for with taxes, to be optimized. If that means racial profiling, because some races are more prone to crime, then so be it. That is another form of fairness. Humans employing these techniques make use of common sense, a long sought after feat that AI barely mimicks.

You do not fix societal problems, such as racism or racial crime statistics with algorithms anyway. These communities should put the blame elsewhere, starting with themselves, before they point the finger at "racist" algorithms. It is not statistics fault when certain groups are more or less likely to commit crimes.

> These communities should put the blame elsewhere, starting with themselves

So the communities of people who are direct descendants of people were forcibly brought here, enslaved, and then systematically denied access to the mechanisms the rest of our ancestors used to build wealth, should blame themselves because they have higher crime rates?

White families have more than 10 times the wealth of black families on average. This is directly caused by the years of systemic oppression faced by their ancestors.

In addition, to this day, we arrest them at a higher rate rate than White people for the same crimes. We are more likely to convict them for the same crimes. And we give them longer sentences for the same crimes. Elementary school teachers even give harsher punishments to Black students for the same infraction.

Job seekers with black sounding names are significantly less likely to be called back for interviews. Black renters have a harder time renting than White renters with the same credit score. The list goes on and on. When you combine all of this, you end up with a community with a higher crime rate. The problem is caused by systemic injustice, it's not a problem that black communities can fix themselves. If you apply those same conditions to any demographic, you would see a higher crime rate--it's inevitable.

>If that means racial profiling, because some races are more prone to crime, then so be it.

And it's absurd to use that higher crime rate to justify racial profiling, which inevitably has a disparate impact on innocent Black people, which erodes trust in police and institutions, which directly leads to even more criminality. In turn that leads to even more racial profiling. You can't just ignore positive feedback loops by mentioning them and pretending they don't exist.

>That is another form of fairness

Trial by combat, enslaving defeated enemies, and separate but equal are all "other forms of fairness" that our society has rejected.

>Yes, I think these communities should take a good look at themselves and confront the problems only they can help solve. Nothing gets done by putting the blame solely on white rich slave master descendants.

On a population or community level pull yourself up by your bootstraps is useless advice. Individually sure, get an education, work hard etc... But across a population, the disadvantages caused by systemic injustice create can't be solved by looking inward.

>My ancestors slaved on the peat mines, but I won't let that define me. It is not helpful at all.

This ignores the fact that discrimination didn't stop with the end of slavery. Until 50 years ago it was still legal to refuse to sell property to a Black person, and today Black people still have a harder time renting and finding employment specifically because of their race.

>I am ok if you say that policing should be about demographic parity, but not if you ignore the costs. By all means, send more police to rich white neighborhoods, to help affluent old ladies cross the road and rescue Persian cats from trees,

Policing by population density means this isn't really a problem, rich white neighborhoods have less naturally have less police presence because of lower population density.

>while gang violence rages in black neighborhoods and continues to ensnare young men

This is the go-to lament of the person unaffected by racism because it makes it looks like they care while costing them the least. You don't end gang violence long-term through law enforcement. We've tried that approach, and it the result is the largest prison population per capita on the planet, which just leads to more criminality, and the positive feedback loop builds. Unfortunately ending gang violence requires us to end systemic injustice, which will cost us quite a bit more than focusing cops on black neighborhoods.

>We all share responsibility to combat racism and disproportionate crime rates.

We do, and for those of us not affected by racism that means agreeing to pay the high cost of ending systemic injustice, not just personally pledging not to use the n-word.

Very droll, very droll. But US law is that even if your policy has no intended racial bias, if it ends up having one, it’s still illegal. And meat is mainly shoplifted by white women.

> But US law is that even if your policy has no intended racial bias, if it ends up having one, it’s still illegal.

Can you elaborate on this? As stated, it sounds not just inaccurate, but impossible: it reads like youre saying that any policy that doesn't result in a uniform (or proportional) racial ratio is illegal, which obviously isn't the case.

I think you're talking about disparate impact (as a legal concept), but this is 1) IIRC likotes to certain domains, like housing or employment and 2) avoidable if the racially-skewed policy is demonstrably related to the job (in the employment case).

As a trivial example, requiring a college degree for a job dramatically shifts the racial distribution of the candidate pool, and obviously isn't illegal.

If the shoplifting system is found to be illegal, AIUI, it would probably be because the case is made that it's _directly_ racially biased (disparate treatment).

I'm trying to figure out what the relevance of the racial, gender, or class group is to this situation and I can't

Age discrimination is also illegal, but do you really want to track grannies the same as teenagers for shoplifting?

Same group that complains when a TSA agent frisks a five year old white kid. All in the name of fairness.

yes

yes?