Aug 9, 2017 05:54 AM
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...t-impulses
EXCERPT: In May last year, a stunning report claimed that a computer program used by a US court for risk assessment was biased against black prisoners. The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people (45% to 24%), according to the investigative journalism organisation ProPublica.
Compas and programs similar to it were in use in hundreds of courts across the US, potentially informing the decisions of judges and other officials. The message seemed clear: the US justice system, reviled for its racial bias, had turned to technology for help, only to find that the algorithms had a racial bias too.
How could this have happened? The private company that supplies the software, Northpointe, disputed the conclusions of the report, but declined to reveal the inner workings of the program, which it considers commercially sensitive. The accusation gave frightening substance to a worry that has been brewing among activists and computer scientists for years and which the tech giants Google and Microsoft have recently taken steps to investigate: that as our computational tools have become more advanced, they have become more opaque. The data they rely on – arrest records, postcodes, social affiliations, income – can reflect, and further ingrain, human prejudice....
MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...t-impulses
EXCERPT: In May last year, a stunning report claimed that a computer program used by a US court for risk assessment was biased against black prisoners. The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people (45% to 24%), according to the investigative journalism organisation ProPublica.
Compas and programs similar to it were in use in hundreds of courts across the US, potentially informing the decisions of judges and other officials. The message seemed clear: the US justice system, reviled for its racial bias, had turned to technology for help, only to find that the algorithms had a racial bias too.
How could this have happened? The private company that supplies the software, Northpointe, disputed the conclusions of the report, but declined to reveal the inner workings of the program, which it considers commercially sensitive. The accusation gave frightening substance to a worry that has been brewing among activists and computer scientists for years and which the tech giants Google and Microsoft have recently taken steps to investigate: that as our computational tools have become more advanced, they have become more opaque. The data they rely on – arrest records, postcodes, social affiliations, income – can reflect, and further ingrain, human prejudice....
MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...t-impulses
