This is a terrible excuse and violates many, many civil protections that we ostensibly have.

I am not suggesting he is correct, I am simply pointing out that if your job is to arrest people with outstanding warrants, how would you go about it? (again, if you were a robot)

Can a robot be racist?

> if your job is to arrest people with outstanding warrants, how would you go about it?

How about: go to their place of residence and knock on their door?

Or: go to their place of work and knock on the door?

After those have failed, try getting a wiretap warrant for their telecom devices. Only after you've got that wiretap warrant, locate them and arrest there.

You know... the stuff that law enforcement is _supposed_ to be doing...

Following a vehicle whose license plate, or its owner, is associated with outstanding crimes makes sense. Following a random vehicle which has not yet committed a crime is wrong. Following a vehicle because it has black people in it is illegal, unethical, and racist. Following a vehicle because an occupant shows up on a face search database should be morally reprehensible for the very same reasons.

Robots will do all those things you suggest simultaneously, and watch every street with cameras, scan faces at every store, pull over cars remotely, turn off your power in your house, get your fired from your job, etc... This is better than racist cops?

By being outraged at one cop's admission of a short cut to finding people who are due in court we are bringing the abomination of robots down on our heads.

> Robots will do all those things you suggest simultaneously, and

And... humanity needs to have a serious discussion about the merits and risks of all of that before we rush to deploy AI.

My point was that people aren't looking for a real solution, they are just outraged irrationally about current events and not seeing how the masses are being steered towards a worse result than they currently have.

No, it's still wrong, immoral, to kill that innocent person to save the crowd of people.

You may, however, still choose to do it anyway, knowing full well that it's immoral.

If killing one innocent person will somehow magically save one million, that too is immoral. And I'd kill that one person to save the million regardless, accepting that it is an immoral act. It's a worthwhile thing to live with, to save so many. Obviously this is in the land of outlandish hypotheticals. Non-the-less, the morality is just the same if the ratio is 1 to 10, 1 to 100, or 1 to one million: intentionally killing - murdering - an innocent person is immoral in all circumstances.

c’mon guys, this is the old trolley dilemma:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.iflscience.com/editors-bl...

> Can a robot be racist?

Yes, it most certainly can. It can use the same priors that people use to be racist. In fact, it usually amplifies the racism of its training data.

Can, and has. [^1]

These are the documented instances, but it can be difficult to determine when such systems are being used in the first place:

Muckrock and Rutgers have been asking governing bodies (via FOIA) whether they're using automated decision-making systems and, if so, how. Many reject their request. [^2]

The practice of "parallel construction" could further conceal their use.

[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166207-discriminating-... [2]: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?projects=84

Gross. God that New Yorker article was onto something.

"What would a robot do?" should not be our ethical solution-finder, as evidenced by Google's customer service, Amazon's product recommendations, and Boeing's equilibrium.

I am not even remotely suggesting we use robots as any sort of guide post for ethics.

I agree, that these things end up bad, but that is my point.

If it's a robot we _should_ be equally outraged, but it's actually not possible unless the robot is _designed_ to be racist.

This is the real concern, humans will be replaced by robots because outrage will simply have less impact. And therefore because we couldn't stomach humans being racist (or whatever the answer is here?) we have to live with robots doing whatever they are designed to do, without any recourse.

The unbalanced outrage will lead to an army of robots running our legal system.

“If it's a robot we _should_ be equally outraged, but it's actually not possible unless the robot is _designed_ to be racist.”

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch... only took 24 hours.

They didn't intend for it to be racist, that is the difference.

A few racist cops, or all racist robots, that is our choices, and it looks like we will be getting robots because of the outrage over a few people.

Do not give a Chicago cop the benefit of the doubt.

Using statistics, a robot would say that the entire CPD is racist. And then it would be taken to Homan Square and beaten until it confessed, while the union rep held a press conference explaining both the robot's extensive criminal history, and the officers' understandable caution in apprehending and controlling such a dangerous individual.

Guess what: if every cop is going around doing mental statistics about who is 'more likely' to make a mistake, they'll introduce bias because they are biasing their sampling with their pre-conceived notions. If you spend your whole day chasing black people and white people get no oversight, then of course you'll be introducing bias.

So whether this cop was being overtly racist or not, he was perpetuating an inherently racist system.

Knowing statistics wouldn't make it any better, it is appalling behavior.

I think we are debating two different things. I don't support his behavior. But if it was a robot, it wouldn't be racist or appalling, but it seems to be that if a human does it is considered racist.

Recording faces and license plates and reporting on data found can't be racist, it is purely neutral. Which is why I think the robot in the story has this job.

I suppose we could blame the programmer or admin if it's designed or configured to go after a particular race. But even a robot can only arrest so many people in a day, and if you optimize an algorithm based on AI (also robot running on data), would it ultimately look like this officer's choices?

I am comfortable saying the algorithm could be made neutral, but I expect it would be extremely difficult to feed it neutral data. Most of what we have now is already heavily skewed because of human involvement. Perhaps starting from scratch, a place of zero knowledge, with absolutely no input allowed from humans.

But even then, I would not accept following two random people around based on skin color and waiting for them to make a trivial mistake that justifies deeper investigation, regardless of what any data might say.

>I would not accept following two random people around based on skin color and waiting for them to make a trivial mistake that justifies deeper investigation

And I agree with you. But guess what a robot would do? It would follow everyone, all the time, everywhere. By being overly outraged about a small minority of racist cops (I really don't believe it's the majority) we will get something worse that will never ever be able to protest our way out of.

Sometimes, I think the answer to a problem is to accept there will always be some problems. If we continue to try and make a perfect system we end up at a wall and then irrationality pushes us into a bad place, worse than what we had before.

> But if it was a robot, it wouldn't be racist or appalling, but it seems to be that if a human does it is considered racist.

Where is this said?

To quote the movie Short Circuit "Robots don't think, they just run programs".

If the software is racist, then the robot is, if the software is not racist, neither is the robot.

Therefore, robots cannot be racist. Only programmers can be racist. (which are people)

No, it's still racist if it is discriminatory in effect.

> Recording faces and license plates and reporting on data found can't be racist, it is purely

The use of Hollerith machines in processing census data to feed the Nazi extermination program was definitely racist.

Of he understood basic statistics he would have controlled for age, sex, neighborhood and car type.

Haha yeah, probably, because people make all sorts of mistakes every day. I see people going through stop signs all the time, for instance.

If I see a car with two cops in it, I just follow them and pretty soon one of them will do something racist.