Re:Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Diffe...
by Houshalter on Saturday October 12, 2013 @06:57PM
(#6540745)
I read the article and I don't get where the source of the title comes from. There isn't anything about poor people being censored from the internet, it's just another technophobia article.
Data science shouldn't be feared. It's just making more accurate predictions about things. Which is a good thing. And insurance companies for example have been doing this since forever. Not much has changed. I don't know if they've ever been required to explain to their customers how their statistics work, and if they were that's kind of ridiculous.
People fear discrimination. They imagine a bigot that arbitrarily hates some group of people and refuses to do business with them or employ them, even when it's in his own best interest. They don't imagine a completely unbiased computer algorithm weighing thousands of different pieces of information and spitting out very accurate predictions. That when it says it's 99% sure of something, it should be right nearly exactly 99% of the time.
For example, using tweets to deploy resources in a disaster. Yes it will make mistakes, but if it's more accurate on average than a human, then it will still save lives.
Data science shouldn't be feared. It's just making more accurate predictions about things. Which is a good thing. And insurance companies for example have been doing this since forever. Not much has changed. I don't know if they've ever been required to explain to their customers how their statistics work, and if they were that's kind of ridiculous.
People fear discrimination. They imagine a bigot that arbitrarily hates some group of people and refuses to do business with them or employ them, even when it's in his own best interest. They don't imagine a completely unbiased computer algorithm weighing thousands of different pieces of information and spitting out very accurate predictions. That when it says it's 99% sure of something, it should be right nearly exactly 99% of the time.
For example, using tweets to deploy resources in a disaster. Yes it will make mistakes, but if it's more accurate on average than a human, then it will still save lives.