Racism is based, in part, on the fact that our brain's pattern recognition and extrapolation faculties are often too simplistic and shallow to see through correlation and make real judgments about causation.
Google's AdSense is nothing more than a pattern matcher, and it is (of course) fundamentally simplistic and stupid when compared to a human. To ask it not to be racist is to ask it to be smarter than ourselves. No doubt some of Dr. Sweeney's colleagues in the Computer Science department at Harvard are working on that very thing -- she should take it up with them.
This is precisely it. The conventional advice goes along the lines of "treat each person on their individual merits and characteristics". This scales fine when you only deal with a handful of people on a day to day basis.
As we do more stuff algorithmically and globally this approach does not scale at all. This can cause technology to re-enforce our biases no matter how subtle.
Comments
Racism is based, in part, on the fact that our brain's pattern recognition and extrapolation faculties are often too simplistic and shallow to see through correlation and make real judgments about causation.
Google's AdSense is nothing more than a pattern matcher, and it is (of course) fundamentally simplistic and stupid when compared to a human. To ask it not to be racist is to ask it to be smarter than ourselves. No doubt some of Dr. Sweeney's colleagues in the Computer Science department at Harvard are working on that very thing -- she should take it up with them.
This is precisely it. The conventional advice goes along the lines of "treat each person on their individual merits and characteristics". This scales fine when you only deal with a handful of people on a day to day basis.
As we do more stuff algorithmically and globally this approach does not scale at all. This can cause technology to re-enforce our biases no matter how subtle.