News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI... by Natsu on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @11:00PM (#23697305)
It's really, really hard to erase biases that are deeply systemic.

For example, from the outset, would you object to an AI that made decisions on how harshly to sentence someone based on age & number of prior crimes?

What about hiring or admitting people to college based on the results of an IQ test?

Yeah, those end up being badly biased, this first has been studied and the second is the reason for dropping SAT/ACT scores--every mental ability test correlates with IQ.

The more interesting thing, IMHO, is that the opposite is also helpful. For example, if you help all poor people equally, you help even the playing field by disproportionately helping out all disadvantaged groups.

Re:Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI... by mc32 on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @11:20PM (#23697407)
Application of law should always have room for judicial discretion. Mandatory minimum sentences should not exist, but then you get outrage over some light sentence here people get all riled over about and want to impeach judges and all.

Education is different. IQ shouldn’t be relevant but competency and aptitude should and in addition we should recognize some people are better off going to vocational school where they may do better economically during their lifetimes.

Re:Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI... by gold_mustard on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @11:23PM (#23709641)
>For example, from the outset, would you object to an AI that made decisions on how harshly to sentence someone based on age & number of prior crimes?

Yes. This is an overly simplistic system for which it would be hard to justify the cost of developing.

>What about hiring or admitting people to college based on the results of an IQ test?

Yes. For the same reason.

Re:Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI... by Natsu on Thursday July 02, 2020 @02:28PM (#23716402)
The first one was intentionally minimalist in order to see how little it took for racial bias to be reconstructed.

For the second, any mental ability test correlates with IQ, so you end up with a different set of difficulties. There have been attempts to, e.g. correct for cultural bias in the tests, but these actually made the problems worse.

I'm not presently aware of anything that makes that situation better.