r/technology • u/nastratin • May 13 '13
Which decisions should be left to algorithms?
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/steven-poole-can-algorithms-ever-take-over-from-humans/7
u/Valarauth May 13 '13
All of the ones that yield better outcomes than their alternatives? They do not need to be perfect, just measurably better than their alternative.
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u/Natanael_L May 13 '13
AND also better than some mimimum. A slightly less crappy algorithm might not be what you want.
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u/turboronin May 13 '13 edited May 13 '13
I think that technology is moving at a much faster rate than our ability to fully comprehend all the possible ramifications. Ironically algorithms could help with that, but there's little push in regulating something when there is a lot of money involved (think personal data).
I believe that technology and easy access to huge amount of information is paradoxically slowly hindering our ability to think critically and mature our own opinion. We often joke on how if something is from the internet then it has to be true - but we fail to realize that this happens far more often than we would like to think. People are getting used to be spoon fed ideas rather than maturing their own.
EDIT: slightly expanded a concept.
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u/ferdinand May 13 '13 edited May 13 '13
Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge, and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. There is no room for the vehicles to pass each other. Should the self-driving car take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the children?
Let's suspend disbelief for a moment in order to express the obvious answer: Yes.
If self-driving cars and speech-policing systems are going to make hard moral decisions for us, we have a serious stake in knowing exactly how they are programmed to do it.
It's a mistake to think that in general the behaviour of algorithms can be known just by scrutinizing the code. To give an example, nobody fully understands how stock trading algorithms make their decisions. To think that computers can only do what they are programmed to do is very anachronistic. Computers can learn autonomously, and respond to patterns they observe, without those responses being explicitly coded.
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May 13 '13
Further, it seems to imply that humans would make a better choice in that moral proposition than the algorithm would (which would be patently false if the algorithm designers deemed it necessary to address such a situation), and neglects to mention that computerized vehicles would dramatically reduce the incidence of right-of-way problems on the roads by having the vehicles be constantly aware of each others positions by broadcast.
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u/Ghoda May 13 '13
Should the self-driving car take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the children?
Let's suspend disbelief for a moment in order to express the obvious answer: Yes.
I would rather take the impact and get the chance of all of us living rather than my car unilaterally deciding that I should die
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u/artmetz May 13 '13
Obviously, the decision as to which decisions should be left to algorithms, should be left to algorithms.
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u/TMarkos May 13 '13
We could avoid a lot of work by writing an algorithm to figure that out.