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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard about a story that appeared on CNN on September 9, 2016.
From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, Cathy O'Neil's new book 'Weapons of Math Destruction' [WMD] looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality.
[...] In a vacuum, these models are bad enough, but O'Neil emphasizes, "they're feeding on each other." Education, job prospects, debt and incarceration are all connected, and the way big data is used makes them more inclined to stay that way.
"Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people," she writes. "Once ... WMDs digest that data, it showers them with subprime loans or for-profit schools. It sends more police to arrest them and when they're convicted it sentences them to longer terms."
In turn, a new set of WMDs uses this data to charge higher rates for mortgages, loans and insurance.
[...] "Big Data processes codify the past," O'Neil writes. "They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that's something only humans can provide."
I'm not interested in the story. I'm interested in what it says about once proud CNN's current quality of journalism. Fox News: Left Division?
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-destruction/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday October 03 2016, @03:01PM
It isn't about math. It's about the use of algorithms to affect peoples' lives without serious attempt to make sure the algorithms are actually making the right decisions.
The problem is the following mentality:
It's hard to decide what's the right thing to to, so we'll program a computer. Never mind about figuring out what the right thing is that the computer is supposed to do. It's a computer, so it must be right.