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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 19 2018, @05:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the and-now-for-the-rest-of-the-story dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

What the Boston School Bus Schedule Can Teach Us About AI

When the Boston public school system announced new start times last December, some parents found the schedules unacceptable and pushed back. The algorithm used to set these times had been designed by MIT researchers, and about a week later, Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, emailed asking me to cosign an op-ed that would call on policymakers to be more thoughtful and democratic when they consider using algorithms to change policies that affect the lives of residents. Kade, who is also a Director's Fellow at the Media Lab and a colleague of mine, is always paying attention to the key issues in digital liberties and is great at flagging things that I should pay attention to. (At the time, I had no contact with the MIT researchers who designed the algorithm.)

I made a few edits to her draft, and we shipped it off to the Boston Globe, which ran it on December 22, 2017, under the headline "Don't blame the algorithm for doing what Boston school officials asked." In the op-ed, we piled on in criticizing the changes but argued that people shouldn't criticize the algorithm, but rather the city's political process that prescribed the way in which the various concerns and interests would be optimized. That day, the Boston Public Schools decided not to implement the changes. Kade and I high-fived and called it a day.

[...] A few months later, having read the op-ed in the Boston Globe, Arthur Delarue and Sébastien Martin, PhD students in the MIT Operations Research Center and members of the team that built Boston's bus algorithm, asked to meet me. In very polite email, they told me that I didn't have the whole story.

There's more to it than first meets the eye.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @11:13AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @11:13AM (#763843)

    From the original submission:

    The lessons learned from Boston’s effort to use technology to improve its bus routing system and start times provides a valuable lesson in understanding how to ensure that such tools aren’t used to reinforce and increase biased and unfair policies. They can absolutely make systems more equitable and fair, but they won’t succeed without our help.

    This tells me, it's hit piece and "feel" happy that AI (bad name, try LP - Learned Programming - since it cannot think).

    All Algorithms are biased. From the date time format (that we we still cannot get right) to rich and poor. Looks at city/power company/who ever digging the street up in front of your house. None sleeps after 6am and is at home at 7am, so yes jack-hammer!!! to talking to neighbours of sound pollution, since it says right here in regs... start at 7am. So the night shift people being assaulted in their own homes. No community planning, even notice.

    With this bus changes, should have at least started at the school level, notice and planning, so all have time to come and talk and plan. But not just one meeting ay 7pm... It needs to be open house from before the first child is dropped to after the last child is picked up. And longer to for people on schedules out side 9-5, because you are affecting them ALL. No AI can do that. And no one responsible for the "AI" is going to put themselves out, either since we are the "normal" people, yup biased.

    We are not an agricultural society any more. That's been gone for more than a century, yet continued treatment of the public is up at 6am, leave by 7am, work 9am to 5pm, home by 7pm, sleep by 11:30pm, repeat... oh and spose stays home. I have not ever known of one person that has that schedule. AND I was raise on farm, with hand milked cows twice a day. You want to see mad, try not milking a cow on time! And that is 7days a week.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:07AM (#764126)

    What? My non-linear programming algorithm is very intelligent. It's so smart that it doesn't have to 'learn' anything else. It was born that way.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_programming [wikipedia.org]