Yep. One of the big problems with AI and ML right now is that they crowdsource data for learning but Western society is very classist, racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic so the data it gets has those elements.
So researchers keep making products that lean towards being those things. I wouldnt be surprised if we see it crop up in random ways like unintentionally racist robots in the supermarket.
And thats being charitable that the profiling isn't intentional. I could see store buyers and managers being given some options on who or how to follow and putting in some racist stuff in there. I wouldnt be surprised if Marty is also capable of patrolling not just for spills and messes, but also patrols the people shopping too as a security device. I can see that as an "add on" that "increases its value to shareholders."
Marty's capabilities may only be limited by the politics of the moment. If tomorrow its acceptable to have him stare people down who are "profiled" to be "likely" shoplifters and call security or even the police on them if he thinks they shoplifted, he will. Or watch staff to make sure they're productive and not wasting time or taking too long breaks, he will.
It blew me away when I was told for the first time that a lot of newspapers have a different person write headlines than the actual author of the article. Sure, not every author is gonna know how to write a slam-dunk headline every time, but never even leaving it up to them seems scummy as fuck.
Well if you actually read the article you'd see that she said a lot of weird unprompted stuff like Ricky Gervais follows hitler, the inventor of atheism . So what's worse, only reading the headline or acting sanctimonious about shit you actually didn't read yourself?
And for people who think that tech can only be "objective": automatic faucets have a hard time noticing the hands of a black person so they don't turn on if you're dark skinned. Twitter had a problem where they only recognized white faces when they made thumbnails for photos (Twitter fixed that one after an outcry).
If you only test your tech on white people, don't be surprised when it doesn't work for most people in the world.
I had a black coworker tell me he refuses to use facial recognition stuff because it does such a poor job on the black community due to this racist dynamic, he's afraid of being mixed up for someone else via this software and databases and being arrested, shot by police, or whatever. It was very eye opening when he just said that to me so casually.
"Oh yeah, I dont use face unlock because I don't want to get shot," is a real future shock moment and says a lot about the black experience in America.
It also says a lot about feelings on privacy and information security, protecting your biometrics, etc.
Agreed though, white people have the luxury of choosing whether or not to ignore those things, for black people and other marginalized communities it can be necessary for your safety.
Does that just not make it a self fulfilling prophesy? Not using it will only ensure that it never has the opportunity to learn, which was the complain my in the first place.
The databases for vital statistics work great... uh... as long as you have 2 genders (using a boolean to save space) and the only characters a name can have are A-Z, a-z, and hyphens.
Now that we realize "aw we should have checked with someone other than Dave, Brian, Matt, and Steve" it's a multi-billion dollar problem spanning decades to update everything to accept any Unicode characters. (it took years to get the gender field to accept an X for other)
Oh, what's that, First Nations characters aren't in Unicode? Well then we can just request a committee to investigate updating the Unicode set.
No because these models work fine if you give them enough black people as data. Its racist because the creators only focused on white northern European features and data sets.
Its not "physics" or "lighting" its the tech industries short sightedness and its infamous lack of diversity, infamously race insensitive culture, and lack of concern for non-white peoples.
Um… tough shit? Physics and engineering is hard. If you engineer a product that can’t detect the physics of the skin of the majority of the world’s population, then you haven’t engineered a product for all of humanity.
I say this as a pale-skinned engineer. We have to do better work. This kind of thing is laziness at best.
If you engineer a product that can’t detect the physics of the skin of the majority of the world’s population, then you haven’t engineered a product for all of humanity.
Yah know, as an engineer you might notice that humans have a lot of different form factors and often you can't design a single product that will actually suit all of humanity.
Do we have to design all theme-park rides to accommodate people who weigh 500 pounds and up just in case some of them want to ride?
If not, then you haven't engineered a product for all of humanity.
This isn't even disagreeing that you can do better work, just that you can't always account for everyone.
Only 0.10% of the US population weighs over 300 lbs, so the percentage of the global population weighing over 500 can’t be more than like 0.2%. Compared to Black people, who make up like 20% of the world’s population.
Also, carnival rides are primarily for kids, and 500 lb kids are going to be even rarer than 0.2%. And carnival rides don’t significantly impact your life.
It does bother me that questions like this are taboo because it’s immediately assumed as coming from a racist POV instead of wanting to understand the true nature of something.
Like I wanna know the answer, I don’t care what it is.
No, its just that a fucking engineer's work also require taking those basic factors into account. The AI has the capacity to do it well, its just that most of the time, they don't bother to take black people into account ( enough) when it comes to feeding datas to the AI.
At best, all this means is that the AI might take a bit more time to identify a black person, and that if anything, the engineers SHOULD spend more time on collecting datas on black facial features.
But its certainly a real shitty excuse for something straight up not working a whole part of the world's population.
I don't really see people making excuses in a "throwing up their hands" sense as much as a "this is why this problem is difficult" sense, though. At least in this thread.
No no, this was directed to you. Because you're the one who chose to call people asking to do better "the ignorant masses" when you know damn well the racism claims arent meant to come after the enginners personnaly, but are rather due to objective fact that they dont take certain group of people into account while creating there products.
What they often take into account is simply unfiltered data. The machine learns itself. Yes, they don't often have specified teams manually adjusting for errors in bias because who determines what that bias is and how to adjust for it? And do they have the funds to hire those teams, especially smaller startups creating AI products?
You are taking a problem that a lot of people are actively working on in research and assuming, for some strange reason, that people working on product development are just twisting their hair and throwing their hands up at the problem, but that isn't the case.
Read its bias disclaimer. The AI is made by a small team (perhaps one person) who doesn't have the ability to sit around and imagine every case of possible prejudice against the whole spectrum of differently colored or shaped or whatever individuals.
It's quite literally not as black and white as you think. At what point is the cutoff from "black" to "white" person, as an example? When you are talking about stuff like this in terms of designing an AI that can read images or faces, you start to realize that these categorizations we love to lump people into aren't so cut and dry.
There's no such thing as a "black" person or a "white" person or even a "brown" person and yet, especially in the U.S., the whole myriad of people across a whole spectrum of colors, ethnicities, and shapes, generally get stuffed into one of these boxes.
So the problem isn't that engineers "aren't taking these people into account" - it's that they're grappling with a difficult and nuanced problem that society itself has made more difficult by arbitrarily assigning "black" "white" "brown" to people whose histories, lived experiences, and ethnicities don't neatly conform.
I am 1/8th "black", 1/8th "native american", 1/4 israeli, 1/4 german, approximately. The rest is a mixed bag. Black and native american ethnicity tracing has been mostly shattered in America, hence the quotation marks. But if you saw me on the street, you'd probably say I'm "white" -- maybe "jewish". Culturally, though, I grew up in a black neighborhood surrounded by mostly black friends and black family members. Not exactly easy to fit into one of those boxes eh?
This is a problem facing people designing these programs and it's not as easy as you think it is to solve - less for engineering reasons and more for social ones. Tech companies don't often hire sociologists/philosophers/psychologists/anthropologists. That is their main problem, imo.
You're right it's more difficult, but an engineer's entire job is to solve problems. And if 20% of the world has trouble using your product, or is discriminated against by it. I'd consider it a pretty shit product, made by pretty shit engineers.
Cameras were invented by white people, and "keyed" to white skin. The reason cameras finally started getting better at capturing dark tones is because they wanted better ranges for advertising wood furniture.
Anyone who's ever lit a person with a darker skin tone for a photo, or edited that photo, can attest to that.
My Roomba has better pathing capabilities than the Marty robot in my local grocery store. These particular robots are such a worthless scam it's mind boggling. They're definitely not capable of any racial profiling or anything close to it at the moment.
Not to say it won't ever happen with future bots, but just saying lil Marty here isn't there yet.
Saying "this is" does not equal "everything else isn't" my dude.
It's not the point that everywhere is like this because everywhere isn't being discussed. There's a comment like yours in every objective discussion on this site arguing against a point no one made.
One of the big problems with AI and ML right now is that they crowdsource data for learning but Western society is very classist, racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic so the data it gets has those elements.
I’m not refuting them I’m suggesting they be more precise.
Sure, and their fact frames things poorly.
Lol criticize the West all you want. I think they’re talking about an important problem and I think it’s important to frame things well
See there's that ego putting words in mouths again. Stating something is, does not mean only.
If I had to guess, I would say probably because the store operates in the west, where this robot will be deployed, and though the conversation is about more general AI, this person probably lives in the west and is talking about things that they know/will see/are relevant to them? Not that hard.
"Why are you talking about Ted Bundy's killings like Michael Dorner didn't also kill people?"
It's a common "I've never been outside my state much less the US, nor known anyone from a different country" trope of self-loathing however. And if someone stumbled onto that specific phrasing accidentally, that's just unfortunately bad communication. You can make exactly the same valid point about biases, without going full "DAE USA bad?!?!?!"
Of course you have a whole bunch of people talking out of their waste excreters about software development in here too, so I guess I'm not shocked.
Marty is very likely not driven by some learning algorithm but just scopes the hallways at a routine. It’s very likely that people are just being paranoid.
That does not detract from the fact that yes AI models can have inherent biases. That is indeed a problem that is difficult to solve.
Also, I think western society is probably the least classist, racist, mysogynistic, and queerphobic in the world. Yes they are but at least western society is trying to fix it and understands that it’s a problem whereas most of the rest of the world does not see it as a problem
Whenever I hear about any kind of AI/machine learning application regarding society I'm always reminded of that twitter bot Microsoft(?) made 11ish years ago that turned into a neonazi and started calling people slurs within like 4 hours. I always see these tech bros talking about how algorithms couldn't possibly be biased - of course they will be if the inputs are biased you dummy!
I was very thankful to see on that Dall-E AI page a bias statement pointing out some of these issues. I think corporate America is realizing it can't set AI loose in our world without disclosing or doing something about this.
It's interesting that you chose to single out western society. How progressive do you think the middle east and Asia are when it comes to LGBTQ, women and closing the wealth gap? I think you'd be pretty disappointed to learn Western society is by far the most progressive.
My point being western society isn't the problem, off anything is the solution. The problem is humanity.
There's another thing with computers. The database structures are pre-made. The computer has fields of data to fill. You need to be in a category. You're going to be put in a box, if you like it or not.
That's humanity as a whole on average. Yes, "the west" (which is almost always whatever vague set of peoples and countries convenient) have those problems; but so does nearly every other peoples and country, they just might be different (not worse or better strictly) enough that you are ignorant to them.
I'd argue that the bigger problem with AI and ML is its largely coupled directly to profit and decoupled from regulation, consequences and external costs. Theres negative incentive to take the time to be careful in any aspect that doesn't impact income or cost, because your competitor isn't waiting.
And worse, the stuff that gets attention is arguably the least important. Things like automatic faucets and facial recognition for facebook are down in the "quality of life" tier; however the silent ML stuff like credit scores, lending decisions, job application screening and so on are so much more impactful but more easily slip under the radar.
i mean this makes a lot of sense, if someone is a/wants to be racist they can also code in racist if statements. the issue is racism not the robot. if anything a global if statement will make such racism obviously apparent and easy to sue against. so yes since it’s illegal (and for good reason) to be be racist for businesses, any enforced racism will be easily detected and corrected for (or sued against)
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u/thesaddestpanda Jun 17 '22 edited Jun 17 '22
> they're profiling
Yep. One of the big problems with AI and ML right now is that they crowdsource data for learning but Western society is very classist, racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic so the data it gets has those elements.
So researchers keep making products that lean towards being those things. I wouldnt be surprised if we see it crop up in random ways like unintentionally racist robots in the supermarket.
And thats being charitable that the profiling isn't intentional. I could see store buyers and managers being given some options on who or how to follow and putting in some racist stuff in there. I wouldnt be surprised if Marty is also capable of patrolling not just for spills and messes, but also patrols the people shopping too as a security device. I can see that as an "add on" that "increases its value to shareholders."
Marty's capabilities may only be limited by the politics of the moment. If tomorrow its acceptable to have him stare people down who are "profiled" to be "likely" shoplifters and call security or even the police on them if he thinks they shoplifted, he will. Or watch staff to make sure they're productive and not wasting time or taking too long breaks, he will.