Comment by infinity0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by infinity0 | Hacker News Reader

The algorithms are opaque but how's that different from a human's own brain? We don't have a very good view into a judge's own life experiences from which his own decisions are based either. At least with an algorithm we have a chance of seeing how it really works, in principle. All the data is recorded and the code is available.

> The reality is that if the algorithm looks like it’s doing the job that it’s supposed to do, and people aren’t complaining, then there isn’t much incentive to really comb through all those instructions and those layers of abstracted code to work out what is happening.”

If a judge is performing well are you going to run an expensive background audit on him, or open up his brain to try to see how he "really works"?

The difference is that algorithms today are practically run by centralised organisations that control it plus the data, rather than having lots of humans all slightly different making their own decisions in a semi-centralised[^] distributed fashion. But the opaqueness is nothing new.

[^] because most human organisations today are hierarchical, but at least most people have some sense of self-agency.

> All the data is recorded and the code is available.

PredPol as mentioned in the article is closed source and considered a trade secret not viewable by the public. It's the largest supplier of these tools in the world.

Human brains are even more closed, than closed source software. That was my point. With closed-source software, at least someone has access to the code and data.

>The algorithms are opaque but how's that different from a human's own brain?

Algorithms can blindly follow through into an obviously illogical decision in ways that a human brain doesn't (and when it does, we consider that person unfit for a job as well).

Algorithms cannot be illogical. They just can't.

Actually they very much can. They just can. Except if you believe in some kind of soul / body duality. Else human-like thinking is something that can be achieved with the right (and properly complex) computing program, including consciousness. And that would include anything logical or illogical that we're capable of.

In other words, if you do believe that humans can be illogical, then who told you the human thinking doesn't come from an algorithm itself (of e.g. NN nature)?

Not that this is not needed, of course, because what I wrote is much easier to achieve. I wrote that "Algorithms can blindly follow through into an obviously illogical decision". That doesn't even need the algorithm to be illogical itself, but just to arrive at an illogical (obviously for us, humans) decision. It can still arrive at that logically. E.g. if I program a simple algorithm that "if the car sees a zebra crossing, go full steam ahead" the algorithm will do just that, whereas most humans would question it.

And if they do that, it gets noticed and fixed. The process is imperfect of course, just like it is imperfect in human organisations.

I maintain that the core difference is the way these technologies are being deployed in a centralised fashion by human organisations, but the technology itself is no less capable than actual human decision-makers.

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