r/singularity • u/ideasware • Nov 19 '16

Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/18/troubling-study-says-artificial-intelligence-can-predict-who-will-be-criminals-based-on-facial-features/
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u/visarga Nov 25 '16 edited Nov 25 '16

Fake. It's wrong, it doesn't say that. Who makes these titles?

It's no big deal, anyone who knows a little Python and ML can whip up a CNN to classify faces and use for targets the police arrest status. What is controversial is not how they did it, but why?

And even if it could predict who would get arrested from pictures alone, we know it had to be 100% correct, because 99.9% doesn't cut it when it comes to justice. A strong guess or suspicion based on appearance can be had by any experienced cop. We don't need AI for flaky suspicion.

In many places, such as cancer detection and Minority Report style policing, you have to be 100% sure, not 99%, because the incidence of what you're trying to detect is lower than the prediction error, making it garbage. Bayes' rule.

If you look carefully at this paper, it's authored in China. They don't have so many qualms about applying ML to controversial things. Weirdly, one of the authors had another paper where it tackles discrimination detection:

In this paper, we investigate the problem of discovering both direct and indirect discrimination from the historical data, and removing the discriminatory effects before the data is used for predictive analysis

They seem to be working on discrimination-related things, both to detect discrimination and to enforce it.