Having worked in making software for almost 3 decades, including in Finance both before and after the 2008 Crash, this blind reliance on algorithms for law enforcement and victim protection scares the hell out of me.
An algorithm is just an encoding of whatever the people who made it think will happen: it’s like using those actual people directly, only worse because by need an algorithm has a fixed set of input parameters and can’t just ask more questions when something “smells fishy” as a person would.
Also making judgements by “entering something in a form” has a tendency to close people’s thinking - instead of pondering on it and using their intuition to, for example, notice from the way people are talking that they’re understating the gravity of the situation, people filling form tend to mindlessly do it like a box-ticking exercise - and that’s not even going into the whole “As long as I just fill the form my ass is covered” effect when the responsability is delegated to the algorithm that leads people to play it safe and not dispute the results even when their instincts say otherwise.
For anybody who has experience with modelling, using computer algorithms within human processes and with how users actually treat such things (the “computer says” effect) this shit really is scary at many levels.
Advocates: take survivors of abuse seriously.
Society: Let’s have computers tell us what to do!I mean I guess the risk of repeated murder-suicide is pretty low…
In the late 1970s (I was a kid) the computer is always right was a common sarcastic parody of all the people who actually believed it.
We’d discover in the 1980s it was possible to have missing data, insufficient data or erroneous data.
It’s a sentiment at least as old as the first things that we now call computers.
On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
—Charles Babbage
As if humans can magically make correct decisions with incorrect information lmao. So true.
The algorithm itself is just a big “whatever”. The key issue here is that some assumptive piece of shit decided to conclude, based on partial information, that those women would be safe in the future.
The computer response should be treated as just an indication and in all cases a human needs to decide to override that
Otherwise we’ll all become useless pieces of a simulation
I went to the bank to ask a loan and then it got rejected because the computer said I didn’t met the parameters by just 40 euro. Ah ok, I told the clerk, just lower the amount that I’m asking or spread it over a longer period. No, because after the quote is done and I signed the authorization for the algorithm to perform credit score, it can’t do it again in 3 months. What?? Call a supervisor and let them override it, 40 euro is so minimal that it’s not that big issue. No, impossible. So that means each single employee in the bank is just an interface to the computer and can be fired at will?
Despite this article, I’m still not convinced that the algorithms aren’t better. The policy states that people need to use their best judgement and can override the algorithms. The article argues that the algorithms are being over relied on. The article mentions in passing, however, that the statistics were worse before the algorithm was introduced.
The point of the matter is, best judgement can be shitty. Your average cop has no idea what questions to ask without a list and how important they are per research. Some suggestions are too continue using the tool but use things like psychologists to administer it. The only way you could reasonably have a psych on call for every police station is to make it a remote interview, which frankly doesn’t seem better to me.
In the end, the unstated problem is resources and how best to utilize them to prevent the violence. I’m sure Spain’s policy could be improved but shoring it up with an algorithm is a good practice.
deleted by creator
Minority Report: the beta test
Our pigs don’t look as good as [generic Hollywood actor]
I have no issues with using ML to predict outcomes. It’s going to be wrong sometimes, so will humans. The system just needs review and input from humans understanding the model.
Pedantic Mathematician here.
If it failed, then it was a heuristic, rather than an algorithm.
Clearly, that’s the most important thing about this post.
You’re welcome.
Why not both? A bad algorithm based on bad heuristics? There are many many algorithms that fail at what they’re supposed to do.
As a non-condescending “mathematician”, I’m happy to help.
Pretty much anything trying to predict human behavior is a heuristic; people using them as if they’ve got some kind of certainty is a problem.
Yes, exactly.
I remember years ago when they said the value of our lives would be determined by a panel of people.
Now its by a machine.
Oh, it’s far worse than that… the value of our lives have been determined by the (so-called) “free market” for a very long time now.
The machine is simply going to streamline the process.
This comment is half a century late.
NASDAQ opened in 1971.
The police accepted the software’s judgment and Ms. Hemid went home with no further protection.
This is what happens when you rely on your Nintendos, instead of using your damn brains.
And that’s why I’m against ALL such things.
Not because they can’t be done right and you can’t teach people to use them.
But because there’s a slippery slope of human nature where people want to offload the burden of decision to a machine, an oracle, a die, a set of bird intestines. The genie is out and they will do that again and again, but in a professional organization, like police, one can make a decision of creating fewer opportunities for such catastrophes.
The rule is that people shouldn’t use machines above their brains, as one other commenter says, and they should only use this in a logical OR with their own judgment made earlier, as another commenter says, but the problem is in human nature and I’d rather not introduce this particular point of failure to police, politics, anything juridical and military.
What is that?
It’s a Doctor’s diagnostic desk from the film, “Idiocracy”
It’s from movie Idiocracy from hospital scene. Initial diagnosis.
Here’s this part of the scene: https://youtu.be/LXzJR7K0wK0
It’s 2505 and the average man from 2005 is now by far the smartest man in the world.
And that’s why I’m against ALL such things.
Absolutely, ACAB
Cops are still necessary. It’s giving humans a machine to blame any failure upon is a very bad thing.
I personally think these "AI"s are supported by governments. There’s been a lot of talk 10-15 years ago how many government official’s functions can be replaced by AI (without quotes), since these functions do not require agenda and are not even too fuzzy, but require semantic understanding. So "AI"s (with quotes) are being used like a vaccine, so that the wide mass of humans would hate the guts of the very idea, having experienced them (EDIT: and wouldn’t want actual semantic reasoning systems). Why - because people working in governments love power and hate transparency, they also hate the idea of being replaced with machines.
Or maybe it’s a conspiracy theory and they all really believe in accelerationism.
some political groups engage in mismanagement on purpose to make people dislike the government, that’s hardly a conspiracy, but it’s a little weird to think they’re propping up the misuse of LLMs rather than that being a natural consequence of stupid capitalism
No, I meant governments doing certain things on purpose to discourage people from trusting that whole direction.
But the system seems to be better than police officers. Which is entirely believable. Humans have all kinds of biases that make the decisions we make far less than desirable.
Per the article, it has decreased the risk of repeated violence and, according to an expert, its the best systen we have. Why would you want to go back to a worse system? This is using our brains in an attempt to overcoming our biases.
Even when given the best and most sophisticated tools and equipment available, police will manage to fuck things up at every opportunity because they’re utterly incompetent.
About 20 new cases of gender violence arrive every day, each requiring investigation. Providing police protection for every victim would be impossible given staff sizes and budgets.
I think machine-learning is not the key part, the quote above is. All these 20 people a day come to the police for protection, a very small minority of them might be just paranoid, but I’m sure that most of them had some bad shit done to them by their partner already and (in an ideal world) would all deserve some protection. The algorithm’s “success” in defined in the article as reducing probability of repeat attacks, especially the ones eventually leading to death.
The police are trying to focus on the ones who are deemed to be the most at risk. A well-trained algorithm can help reduce the risk vs the judgement of the possibly overworked or inexperienced human handling the complaint? I’ll take that. But people are going to die anyway. Just, hopefully, a bit less of them and I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s the machine’s fault when they do.
Is it really too much to want enough resources to respond appropriately to all cases?
Sounds like a triage situation. That really sucks for the women affected.
More data for the algorithm then.
Minority Don’t Report
Cracked me up thanks!
