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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: 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?