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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 21 2015, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-the-inhumanity-of-it-all dept.

Algorithms tell you how to vote. Algorithms can revoke your driver’s license and terminate your disability benefits. Algorithms predict crimes. Algorithms ensured you didn’t hear about #FreddieGray on Twitter. Algorithms are everywhere, and, to hear critics, they are trouble. What’s the problem? Critics allege that algorithms are opaque, automatic, emotionless, and impersonal, and that they separate decision-makers from the consequences of their actions. Algorithms cannot appreciate the context of structural discrimination, are trained on flawed datasets, and are ruining lives everywhere. There needs to be algorithmic accountability. Otherwise, who is to blame when a computational process suddenly deprives someone of his or her rights and livelihood?

But at heart, criticism of algorithmic decision-making makes an age-old argument about impersonal, automatic corporate and government bureaucracy. The machine like bureaucracy has simply become the machine. Instead of a quest for accountability, much of the rhetoric and discourse about algorithms amounts to a surrender—an unwillingness to fight the ideas and bureaucratic logic driving the algorithms that critics find so creepy and problematic. Algorithmic transparency and accountability can only be achieved if critics understand that transparency (no modifier is needed) is the issue. If the problem is that a bureaucratic system is impersonal, unaccountable, creepy, and has a flawed or biased decision criteria, then why fetishize and render mysterious the mere mechanical instrument of the system’s will ?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/05/algorithms_aren_t_responsible_for_the_cruelties_of_bureaucracy.single.html

 
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by SubiculumHammer on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:25PM

    by SubiculumHammer (5191) on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:25PM (#186106)

    Suppose an uber rich dude gave me a replicator robot. This robot first works a job and earns money for me This pays for raw materials. Each month this robot has the materials to replicate itself. I now have two robots. After a month I have over 1024 replicator robots working for me. 100 robots set out to build me a sweet house. 100 robots build a farm and raise food for me. 100 robots build furniture. 100 robots build an awesome swimming pool with a waterfall. 100 robots shop, clean, and cook food for me and my massive pool parties. 100 robots then give me massages, cut my hair and wipe my butt. 100 robots guard the perimeter of my property. 100 robots tailor my clothe me and my army. 100 robots do my doctoring and lawyering. 100 robots are maintain my robot army's good operation.

    The final 24 robots are unemployed hippies. Lazy turds.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:27PM (#186107)

    Damn it: Should have read after 10 months, not after a month.
    Can we please have editing capabilities when our Karma is really high?