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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 17 2017, @03:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the swear-on-a-stack-of-K&Rs dept.

At The Guardian, Cathy O'Neil writes about why algorithms can be wrong. She classifies the reasons into four categories on a spectrum ranging from unintential errors to outright malfeasance. As algorithms now make a large portion of the decisions affecting our lives, scrutiny is ever more important and she provides multiple examples in each category of their impact.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @04:38PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 17 2017, @04:38PM (#540378) Journal

    Some of the first words in the article are:

    "and sometimes they are designed to deceive"

    "Lots of algorithms go bad unintentionally. Some of them, however, are made to be criminal."

    It's clear that nobody wanted to read the article or even the summary, instead preferring to take a dump on the headline. If everyone had read the article, we would have some whining about the "cultural biases" mentioned instead.

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
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  • (Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Monday July 17 2017, @06:00PM

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Monday July 17 2017, @06:00PM (#540433)

    It doesn't help that the headline said something nearly everyone with a passing familiarity of the actualities involved would have a snap reflex to, like touching a hot stove.