It's hard to weigh the aggregate harm of doing something slightly bad at massive scale against the aggregate harm of doing something very bad to a small group. Both are pretty bad, and we should be vocal about both.
The whole point is that it never is trained on a "Senegal" dataset, is it? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results?
While it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. And acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it; the stakes are too high.
She didn't call him a racist. She pointed out that there's more to addressing bias than just acknowledging that it's there. If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? Why do you, knowing of the problem, keep using biased sources of data, knowing of the potential harms?
That's the deeper question ML research/industry has to grapple with. When these models are deployed increasingly quickly and at scale in ways that can potentially cause massive harm, why is it okay to keep doing the same exact harmful things?
LeCun mentioned that there would have been opposite problem if it were trained on a dataset from Senegal. But why wasn't it trained on a dataset from Senegal? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results?
It's obvious that while it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a world with deep sociocultural biases in favor and against various racial groups. And it is unjust to let AI perpetuate and entrench these biases by acting at with this bias at scale.
Acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it (even if we choose not to prioritize it.)
Open source has become yet another way for big tech companies to exploit laborers. If you are an independent developer working on an open source project without a copy-left license, you are a fool.
Fairness is a legitimate end unto itself, an essential part of what makes a justice system 'just'.
If reducing crime is our only objective, we can do so trivially by indefinitely detaining anyone who ever does something suspicious. I think most people would find this system to be deeply unjust, even if it eliminated crime.
As a society, we have some tolerance for crime, preferring to err on the side of personal liberty against totalitarianism.
Asking for fairness in this recidivism model isn't a case of political correctness run amok, it's a reasonable request from stakeholders in the system it affects: Why should an individual be punished for the actions of others who happen to have similar identity markers?
You can say that a biased system will be "more efficient", but efficient to what end? A system that is unfair may reduce crime but it won't achieve "justice".
One half solution that people don't tend to bring up: massively increase the number of members of congress. The formula for a states representation in the electoral college is {number of senators + number of representatives}.
Since the senate is fixed at 2 senators per state, it massively advantages small states in terms of political power per person. The number of representatives per state is currently set at 435, and is allocated proportionately to population. This number is arbitrary, and can be changed by an act of congress. Increasing it will dilute the power of the electors from the Senate.
There's also compelling reason to increase the number of for its own sake: the number of people per representative is higher now than it has ever been. And it's much higher than other Western democracies.
When the Constitution was written, the number of representatives was set so there'd be one for every 30,000 people. The idea was that the number would be increased over time, and there was almost almost an amendment ratified to ensure this would happen, where the ratio would never get above 50,000 per.
But the number of representatives hasn't been updated since 1929. Back then, there was one representative per 218,000 people. Now there's one representative per 744,000. If we had the 1929 ratio in place, we'd have 1505 representatives. And if we set representatives at 50,000 per person (as preferred by founders such as Washington), we'd have 6564.
It's still an issue in that this wouldn't afford equal representation. The way the number of electors is determined is {senators + members of congress + 3}. Since the senate affords massively more representation per person to rural states, rural states will be overrepresented in this system as well.
I disagree. Consider our inability to coordinate a proper pandemic response, or the current smoke catastrophe spanning the west coast. The problems facing our country are increasingly national in scope, and require coordinated responses at the federal level. I believe our entrenched commitment to federalism and state's rights is going to hold us back more and more in the years ahead.
Unless you are entrepreneur with access to capital, I'm not sure how you can expect individuals to will a good employer into being if none is to be found. Using the government to create better conditions for the working class is a completely reasonable use of the political process.
Capital has an immense amount of leverage in the market, and the only way for that power to be counteracted at scale is through government action and/or labor organizing. Individuals can't will a reasonable employer into being on their own.
Uber and Lyft are voluntarily suspending operations to make a political point; they are the ones kicking the little guy while they're down. The fact that these companies can spend 100 million to dismantle the outcome of the political process shows how little power the California government actually has.
I think it's reasonable for a government to crack down on businesses where the entire operational structure is designed to subvert that government's tax code and regulations.