I would argue that the case is precisely the opposite. I was literally talking to someone from Colombia yesterday who was complaining to me about how all Venezuelans are lazy criminals that are stealing their jobs, when in an American context, people wouldn't even distinguish between them -- they'd both be 'hispanics' or 'latinos'.
That person took a difference caused by a temporary political and economic situation and applied it to a population of people as an inherent property. I think that is actually the way that _most_ people think, and to make people think otherwise requires a lot of education.
(Not saying wether it's "true", "false" or 78% likely here)
Many people have been repressed their whole lives. It doesn't get better by digging heels in, but sometimes compromise and not trying to win all wars, may turn out improved outcomes.
A big problem is the whole dull-minded "right vs left" duality. Tribal mentality that replaces actual issues and solutions.
With enough education, you can make most people think just about anything.
That is true for people in the western world that have been heavily dosed with the ideas coming out of the western social sciences in the past 100 years or so, and not really anyone anywhere else, ever.
You're assuming that that disparity is not itself a result of bias in any way.
Again, there may be justifications to deliberately introduce bias in the model to produce higher rates of association between women and technology than would normally occur if the creators of the AI so desire. But this is not elimination of bias, this is deliberate introduction of bias to make th model match the creators' worldviews.
This is incredibly reductive - we use models for MANY purposes - prediction, inference, description, evaluation. Until you outline a specific use case for the model, understand where the data its trained on comes from and how it may or may not reflect reality, and think about whether the phenomena which you're measuring are important/sufficient for your application you CANNOT possibly justify your broad claims.
Say you have an AI that predicts probability of re-offending for prospective parolees. If we observe that this system is flagging men as high risk more frequently than women, then this is not indicative of bias.
But!, one might say, men are socialized to be more violent and are more frequently recruited by gangs. These factors are being absorbed by the AI. Yes, they are, and this does not make the AI biased. The job of the AI to predict risk of re-offending in real world conditions. Not risk of re-offending in a hypothetical world where everyone has the same environment and experiences.
If we were to manually adjust the model to make it display equal risks for both men and women then that is not elimination of bias. It is deliberate introduction of bias to make the output fit our ideal worldview.
Already you've made one of the most common mistakes in this area: confusing the label for the latent truth. We don't measure "re-offending", we measure rearrest and re-incarceration, which as I've discussed elsewhere are biased (in the sense of "unjust").
> If we were to manually adjust the model to make it display equal risks for both men and women then that is not elimination of bias. It is deliberate introduction of bias to make the output fit our ideal worldview.
Again, you are using the word "bias" in a vague and meaningless way. In this context, our goals are constrained by the law - in the US we guarantee people certain rights, and prohibit certain kinds of discrimination. In this example, it would indeed be wrong (and illegal) to punish men more harshly just for being men, since gender is a protected class. In the same way, it would be wrong (and illegal) to punish black people more harshly just for being black. In my state, whites and blacks use cannabis at equivalent rates, and black people are arrested 8 times as often per capita - an algorithm looking at arrests will see that and make the problem worse.
You've staked out some sort of naiive and bizarre "AI Purity" stance which completely ignores how such models work, and which misunderstands how we use models to learn things and solve problems. You're also mixing up different definitions of "bias". Some facts which you might find interesting:
* Penalization/shrinkage, which is ubiquitous and incredibly useful in many predictive models, is the deliberate introduction of bias to improve prediction performance
* Adjusting for confounding in regression/classification type models is one way of accounting for or removing bias in a statistically rigorous way - as you (imprecisely and inaccurately) say, "modifying the model to make it display equal risks". This allows us to measure effects, conditional on known risks or existing patterns.
* All statistical and machine learning algorithms suffer from sampling bias, where the data we observe doesn't match the reality in important ways - a fact which you're completely ignoring. If a model reflects the bias in a bad sample, why on earth should we accept that?
If all it's doing is associating being a man with a higher risk factor without taking into account anything else in that man's life then, yes, it's being biased. "Being a man" in this situation is a correlation to, not casuation of, actual factors making a person more likely to commit crime.
This is a real problem that has been happening for years in Florida: the automated risk assessments used for a variety of decisions, including bail and sentencing factors, labels black people as inherently being more likely to reoffend than white people, even after controlling for actual crime rates and recidivism rates. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
Briefly, (and simplifying for clarity) it worked like this: the ML algorithm scored the risk of criminals reoffending. It gave a "high risk" score if someone was 80% likely to re-offend, and a "low risk" score if they had a 20% chance. Out of 100 blacks and 100 whites, here are the scores the ML algorithm gave, and how many ultimately did re-offend:
100 black criminals
* 50 "high risk", 40 re-offended
* 50 "low risk", 10 re-offended
100 white criminals
* 10 "high risk", 8 re-offended
* 90 "low risk", 18 re-offended
On the other hand, the failure mode disproportionately punished the black criminals: 10 were "high risk" who never re-offended, while only 2 white criminals were. Meanwhile, 18 "low risk" white criminals did re-offend while only 10 black criminals did. So the score was more strict for some unlucky blacks and more lenient for some lucky whites.
However, a key point is that because the underlying re-offense rates were different between the populations (50/100 for the black criminals, 26/100 for the white criminals), the algorithm could not have done otherwise. That is, given some n% re-offenders, if you have to fit them into 20% and 80% buckets, your "high risk" and "low risk" counts are mathematically fixed. In other words, it wasn't the ML by itself that was the problem, but the COMPAS score that it was trying to compute that had these issues inherent in it.
I think this is a good example where ML wasn't biased (at least, not anymore than reality), but where people were too eager to turn to it for a poorly considered project. By wrapping up important questions in high tech algorithms, it's too easy to fool yourself that what you're doing is the best thing you could be doing and miss problems in the fundamental framing.
2) The whole point of systems is to impact the world, not replicate already recorded history or escalate problems.
Can the ML algo predict what the outcomes and consequences of its outputs are, and assess that? No?
Would you prefer an outcome where half of the white men were also marked as high risk, but with 16 reoffending? (to give the low risk pools the same recidivism rate) Now instead of unjustly marking ten black men and two white men as high risk, you're doing so for thirty-four white men. Is that somehow less discriminatory?
Because in the end, the choices are "accept that there will be a correlation between the outputs and race", "use no system that produces estimates or imperfect outputs", or "explicitly discriminate based on race to remove the race-result correlation". That's it.
I agree that an AI shouldn't use race or gender as an input. But we should not surprised when AIs have disparities when predicting risk of committing crimes, when there are disparities in the rates of actually committing crimes.
Perhaps you think there are certain feedback loops that need to be broken (your model is usually a static representation of the reality), or perhaps you prefer low rate of false negatives / false positives, or perhaps if a model is uncertain you would like to defer to a human.
If a model predicts high probability of re-offence, you might decide to delay an action as an example, or re-examine the case in more detail.
I get a feeling that machine learning practitioners are not properly trained to recognize such subtleties, everything is a binary softmax output these days :)
EDIT: This seems to stem from the obsession with purely discriminative models that either directly model a binary function y = f(x) or model a function that returns some kind of score, which is later compared to a threshold y = f(x) > theta. Neither of these lend themselves nicely to this conceptual separation between modeling and decision making.
Just because bad data may tend (in hindsight) to yield inaccurate decisions, or decisions based on faulty data, doesn't promote data as the main driver behind sound decisions. That would just be another belief system, and we don't have all possible data or omniscience to prove it!
As I wrote in my original comment, there are potential justifications as to why we might want to introduce bias in our machine learning models to prevent the from identifying things we don't want. But the point remains: building a model that, for example, associates technology with men and women at equal rates despite the disparity that exists in the reality is not the elimination of bias. It's the deliberate introduction of bias to make the model produce a result that is in line with what we consider a more ideal worldview.