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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 17 2017, @07:07PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday July 17 2017, @07:07PM (#540487) Journal

    then the net can (will probably) learn to lie in order to meet that goal.

    No. Learning to lie would mean the net would learn what the correct response would be, but decide to give another response. While in reality the net will work out how to meet the given goal, and therefore it will give what, according to its programming, is the right answer, even though it is not the right answer according to what we actually want. Or in other words, the network is not lying, it is misinformed.

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