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.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday November 19 2018, @05:50AM (9 children)
Answer: nothing. Humans distrust "algorithms" and "computers", despite, in many cases, having thier lives depend on these things.
Implementations of changes (especially timetable changes) are hard. The people implementing these changes almost always screw it up. No one wants fewer services, so if there are any reductions, some people will be unhappy, even if over all travel times drop, for most users.
Tl;dr: People hate change. Blaming it on algorithms is not helpful.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 19 2018, @08:30AM (8 children)
What I learned here, was that people are selfish. Not all people, but enough people to make a difference. And, the SJW refrain of White Privilege.
People, in general, were accepting of this new bus schedule. Far more people were going to benefit, than the number of people who might lose a little. But, the problem was, exactly which people might lose something. Wealthy people, and perhaps less importantly, white people, stood to lose some benefit, whether real or imagined. It appears that poor people may be gaining something, and maybe poor brown and poor black people might gain a little more than poor white people.
But, because the privileged elite thought they were going to lose, then SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE™
This seems to be yet another instance in which democracy simply doesn't work the way it's meant to work. The squeaky wheels always get greased. The wealthiest have the means to make the most noise, unless the poorest just decide to riot.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday November 19 2018, @10:29AM (1 child)
Well, you learn something new everyday, today it was that there are actually places in the USA where "the privileged elite" send their kids to public schools.
Need to look on the bright side sometimes - Boston's public schools must be awesome (far better than the parts of the USA I've been to) if the elite send their kids there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @03:44PM
Boston's public schools are pretty awesome, as are Cambridge's the next town city over across the river (where MIT is). The high school looks like a college campus, and they have robotics classes in school. And if anything the cost of housing in the city over the past few years being out of control has only helped to fund the school's more, thanks to rising revenue from property taxes.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday November 19 2018, @10:38AM (4 children)
What I learned was that AI has reached the point where it can optimize schedules and provably save money, but the next frontier is the ability to use current computer text/image/audio/PSTN/video communication interfaces to:
Sounds like science fiction, but hey, we're already living in the future right now.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday November 19 2018, @08:32PM (3 children)
Can we not teach the computers to "convince" human beings of anything? Unequal distribution of persuasiveness is a breeding ground for demagoguery. In other words, when one group is more persuasive than the rest (and one group would initially have exclusive access to convincing computers), you tend to see liars and con men rise from that group to the highest places of power.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Monday November 19 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)
Hmm -- you make a strong argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @04:59AM
Don't let him convince you!!
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Monday November 19 2018, @11:25PM
Borrowing cold war (?) terminology, we are currently experiencing a "persuasion gap" with the Russians based on influence cues we observed shortly during the election. Mr. President, we can ill afford to let the Russians get ahead of us, which is why we're asking for additional DoD and NSA funding for AI persuasiveness research.
We're testing this right now, the results of which we have started applying in basic, controlled scenarios. Also, have you lost weight? And your hair looks fantastic today, sir. Very virile.
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Monday November 19 2018, @12:49PM
From reading the article, it seems the losers were physically handicapped kids like the kid who takes two hours to eat thru a feeding tube.
In general, of course you're correct that anything anti-white or white hatred in general is extremely progressive and left wing, and Boston being left wing, you can assume any changes they make are inherently implied to be anti-white, although in this case if you read the article the changes were actually anti-handicapped people, LOL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @11:13AM (1 child)
From the original submission:
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
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]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Muad'Dave on Monday November 19 2018, @12:13PM
So a reporter goes off half-cocked without the whole story. Not exactly news.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Monday November 19 2018, @05:05PM
The real issue is that family schedules are difficult in the first place and many employers are inflexible.
For example, the school changes it's schedule and suddenly the 7 year old that used to get home from school within minutes of a parent or older sibling is home alone for 2 or 3 hours.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DutchUncle on Monday November 19 2018, @06:23PM (1 child)
A new way may indeed be "better" (for some definition thereof), but destabilizing established patterns has costs.
This story has nothing to do with AI or algorithms, beyond the basic definition that any consistent set of instructions for performing an operation or computation can be called an "algorithm". It has to do with making abrupt changes to aspects of people's lives that have been consistent for a long time, and that many people may have trouble adapting to because of the other constraints in their lives. People take jobs with certain schedules precisely because they fit in with other schedules, like one parent working early and the other parent working late so that one can see the kids off in the morning and the other is there in the afternoon, and making a sudden change in the school schedule can throw a lot of people's lives out of whack. As the child of a teacher, I can tell you that teachers have their own child-care schedule issues as well.
Schools near me have also talked about making little kids earlier, high school later, in accordance with the recent research. But that means little kids need after-school supervision earlier, and it also means that high-schoolers can't fill after-school jobs, and no matter how well-intentioned it's a serious change with wide side effects. We've already had this with the school year schedule - when I was in college, "summer job" or "summer camp" meant all the way through the Labor Day weekend, and schools started in September; now colleges start in August, so the college-kid labor pool is different, so the summer programs don't work the same way, etc. etc. Maybe it sounded good to have the fall semester end at winter break; maybe it is assumed that more places have air conditioning. But it changed the calendar of major areas of society, without any synchronization or collaboration or cooperation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday November 19 2018, @08:38PM
This, absolutely. The problem isn't that the algorithm came up with a bad answer. The problem is that the people using the algorithm thought people would just trust them and the results of the algorithm. In other words, they failed to politically justify themselves.
The job of a politician is to communicate with the public. Not to improve public policy, although they should be empowered to do so based on what the public tells them. Touching public policy without considering public input first and foremost is nothing but a political error.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?