Skip to main content

Subtle Bias

Stephen Hawking might have seen things that are decades out when he warned of the perils of AI - the larger, grander view of the world that is not accessible to most average people. Those are words of caution to be heeded. Even in the most mundane of AI applications that I run into given my work, the perils are plainly evident. The simple business of sentiment analysis for example can be fraught with trouble that were never anticipated. The accuracy of many models depends on the the data used to train it. The more comprehensive the training set the better the quality of results. In a sentiment analysis problem, the biases of the subject matter experts assigning sentiment scores to free form text in the training set forms the guts of the model. 

It is not very hard to sway results in specific ways to achieve desired outcomes. If the results of the sentiment analysis for example were to be associated with financial outcomes for the those requesting such analysis, it is easy to see how subtle biases could be introduced to maximize their gains. All actions following from there would be driven by AI and unlikely to deliver benefits in a democratic manner. This is very far from machines taking over the world, but it is a way for machines to scale and expand  the pernicious impacts of our character flaws. Instead of having local and contained impact, we now have the ability to cause large scale damage by way of AI.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...