Shockley created the transistor, formed the pioneering and archetypal start-up in Shockley Semiconductor, which led to Fairchild and eventually formed Intel. How was is possible for such a brilliant man to hold views on race that were so distorted and peddle discredited pseudo-science with such conviction after winning the Nobel Prize?
Why wouldn't you assume intentionality as more likely than not given the disturbing history of race in Silicon Valley? The position you hold out of the gate is unlikely and your assumptions of good-faith are misplaced. William Shockley, who invented the transistor and essentially set up the Valley and it's culture, was an outright white supremacist. You see his legacy in the hiring percentages. The probability is that this was done on purpose. Your position is dangerous, in all honesty, because it sets up the idea that there is a logical similarity between Black Men and monkeys. "Look! Even a computer thinks so!" - and that we must modify outcomes so spare Black people's feelings. Note that the alleged error wasn't in distinguishing humans from monkeys as you state in error, but Black Men specifically.
I am not here to "sway" you. Your hand-wavey dismissal is absurd, given the history of race in Silicon Valley. William Shockley was an out-and-out white supremacist. He goes on to form Shockley Semiconductor which begets Fairchild which becomes Intel. He set the culture. It is patently obvious that this outcome is likely written in code, and for you to dismiss this probability is absured. You have not discredited my position in any way, nor even attempted to challenge it. How on earth would you know if my understanding of ML is "poor" or otherwise? The joke in the code was to associate Black Men with monkeys. It is a trope that goes back hundreds of years. The joke is: "Look, even computers think Black men are primates" and that this position is objective, logical.
But that's not what happened, is it? The algorithm hasn't miscategorised men, it has miscategorised Black men. I'd argue the AI has done its job, with a high degree of accuracy. It found what the programmers were looking for when they wrote the code. It was meant to be an insult, and was highly effective. Lack of outrage on HN is as expected; the authors are quite possibly in the comments holding their sides with laughter.
I'm sorry but no. I don't believe this at all. What are the chances of say, you finding a dataset maliciously labelled by racists and how would you uncover that? Would you ask every software engineer how he felt about Black Lives Matter as he tagged images? It's more likely that there is malicious intent in a company where 2% of software engineers are African-American than not.
I find it baffling and dispiriting that you, as a Black person, believe this is more likely to be an "error" than an act of deliberate racism. It's getting silly, now. A white racist programmer has done this on purpose because he finds it hilarious. The chances of a computer equating monkey and man, given the correct datasets, are close to nil. There's a blindness - a wilful ignorance - to look away and show good faith. Why is that?
Anki is just a slice of Piotr Wozniak's ideas, and the algorithm it uses isn't as good as that implemented in his own software, SuperMemo. And besides: it doesn't do incremental reading, which is lights-out amazing: https://super-memo.com/supermemo18.html
Apple became the biggest corporation in the world because they worked out how to build humane interfaces into the technologies that shape the future. That you believe Grandma will be just fine nerding around with system internals, or will care what ROM is(!) shows just how far out of touch so many hackers really are. I'm sorry, but no: Android is not a solution.
Meanwhile in the real world, my brilliant friend, who cares about privacy, called me in a panic because she couldn't work out how to shift/right-click a video in her browser to download it to her hard drive, and you believe Linux is a viable alternative to the vast majority of ordinary people?
"Consumer choice" is not how you stop hostile all-pervasive monopoly machine learning algorithms. The number of times I've heard from smart people: "Don't use Google"; "Don't use Amazon"; "Microsoft are evil" (true) - now "Don't buy it". Running into the hedgerows and away from the mainstream of digital life is not an option for all but a tiny fraction of people. "Just get an Android phone!" is an even worse idea.
Thanks for the links, I appreciate this. I disliked much of the article, even if it was fascinating. Here's why: I can think of no joint venture in contemporary American culture where Black and White people built together as equal partners. As such, I thought it had a whiff of wishful thinking and horseshit about it. This was the era of hardcore Jim Crow. Martin Luther King leads the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, the same year(?) Emmett Till is lynched. For instance, the appropration of Doo Wop by Italian-Americans sounds improbable. It was created by Black kids in the 40s, but Italian-Americans were (are) not exactly known for their multi-cultural spirit. You can see it depicted in Spike Lee's film "Do The Right Thing". And that infamous scene in True Romance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZUJKXs6W-4
So how did this really happen? The mechanisms of cultural collaboration didn't really exist, but I would love to be corrected. I doubt it is different from hip-hop: it's built almost in it's entirety on the Black cultural underground, and some talented white people who skirt around the edges eventually learn enough to make a stab at the "mainstream".
I agree. Most people don't know, which makes me sad. Perhaps it's an opportunity for you to discover the secret history of the music. It's a wonderful and interesting journey.
That's not true. Afropunk was a response to the question you pose. White people stole the rock from Black kids the way Ancient Greece stole the Hippocratic Oath from African culture. It is almost the same. Today, it's almost impossible to know Bo Diddley, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other Black pioneers created rock in almost it's complete form. "History is written by the winners", they say, and our cultural memory is like a hard drive which has been written over. Show the typical rock fan footage of Black women going hard at a rock guitar in 1955, and they will profess shock. The re-writing of history has been successful. The "analogous new rock scene" you are searching for is called rap. It is rock music without guitars and for years in the early days, without white people. Think about Run-DMC in 1982, and how "punk-rock" they were with the stripped down sound and hard lyrics. Black artists were hounded out of rock music by racist promoters and a hostile music industry, and their answer to it was hip-hop. The history of Black music has been of flight, an attempt to escape white cultural aggression stealing their music and style without accreditation or compensation. Promoters defunded and starved out Black performers, and the answer to that is two turntables and a mic on the underground, sound systems plugged into street lights - where they can't get defunded, have control, and have no white people. The Beatles up until 1964 were almost identical to the Isley Brothers but racism in the US was so entrenched that Americans had to re-import the music on their doorstep being made at home through 4 white kids from Liverpool. How ironic is that?