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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why this article conflates machine learning progress and racism. Machine learning is not inherently racist though it may be implemented, intentionally or unintentionally, to produce racist results. It's much easier to solve racism in machine learning models though then in humans and easier to test to confirm that you have corrected it.

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There are a whole slew of "advanced AI programs" out there that tells managers who to fire and who to keep, tells judges if someone should go to jail or not, etc.

There are a lot of systems out there where peoples lives are changed forever "because the machine said so".

I'd argue that since machine learning learns only from it's data (produced by it's human creator), it becomes a great tool for baking in unconcious biases in a completely opaque system and amplifying those biases.

Much easier to tell if a human seems to be biased than if the dataset fed to an AI algorithm is biased.

I don't agree with that. If someone says "The AI is biased" we can just look at the data it was trained on or come up with a set of test cases to establish the bias. We can update the training data or method to remove the bias too.

If someone says a person is biased they can just say "No I'm not" and then how do we tell? We can't really make a person do a million judgments and find statistical evidence. We can't dive into how the possibly biased person came to have or not have biases.

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