I do a lot of hiring here at 被小男滋润的熟妇 Pi – and I’d never DREAM of using an automated filter for applications for the reasons you mention! No applicant is ever going to tick all the boxes, some have unusual but perfectly valid backgrounds, and some of these filters are totally opaque; in the interests of getting great applicants we’re more than ready to hand-screen everything we get here rather than subbing out to an algorithm that’s going to lack the flexibility of a human.

Absolutely. Personally I’m not sure whether all applicants are actually given a fair chance. For example, someone with dyslexia might be a brilliant programmer, but accidentally make a few spelling errors in their cv.

An example is an autonomous vehicle, does it kill the driver to avoid school kids?
被小男滋润的熟妇 is coming in that shows people trust autonomous vehicles more than people driving. Do these people with trust believe the car is more ethical or just better at predicting and reacting as well as drive “safer”?

Can unethical algorithm be taught to be ethical?
If it passes an Ethical Turing test, is it ethical or just pretending to be ethical?

Here in Australia we have Robo-Debt, a computer algorithm that predicted tax debts based on income averaging even on dead people. Was this ethical or just bad programming? There is an indication more 150,000 people paid debts they might not have owed. Here the question becomes, do we trust government? GiGo, garbage in, garbage out. Ethical behavior is what people can trust and believe in. Is that the test?

However I would like to comment on the questions posted in this blog post in a very concrete and practical way.

– What algorithms do you interact with every day?

I have no idea. How can I know? Of course my computer is teeming with algorithms, for all kind of things in the operating system and applications. Everything from Euclid’s two thousand year old GCD to the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm and Tony Hoare’s Quick Sort of the 1960’s. And many more besides.

Of course as soon as I hit the net I’m dealing with Google’s Page Rank algorithm and all kind of AI/deep learning etc that I have no idea about.

– How large are the decisions you allow algorithms to make?

This is a dumb question. I have no control over the size of decisions those algorithms make. Out there on the net, used by other people to make decisions about my life. For example:

My bank may decide to loan me money or not. Depending on what their algorithms tell them about my financial history and whatever else they can find.

Insurance companies will adjust my insurance rates depending on what their algorithms tell them about my medical history, my driving record and whatever else they can find.

Companies may decide to employ me or not. Depending on what their algorithms tell them about me.

And so on, and so on, more and more everyday.

– Are there algorithms you absolutely do not trust?

See above. I can trust the likes of Euclid’s GCD and Tony Hoare’s Quick Sort. I cannot trust anything I do not know even exists or where it is or who is using it or how it works.

– What do you think would happen if we let algorithms decide everything?

Interesting question. We seem to be performing the experiment to find out as we speak. On a global basis.

TL;DR

Algorithms do not have ethics or morals. The people who use them as tools to get what they want done might have (Although the latter is not always clear to me)

AI ethics is very interesting because to under stand “ethics” programming, we need to understand human ethics. We sort of know instinctively but how do to get enough detail to code for it? Will AI’s need to learn ethics? Can people learn ethics. Those old Greek guys say “virtue” must be practiced. But could it lead to an artificial conscious that everyone will have monitoring them? An Ethics app? What is the Ethics Turing test and how many Politicians could pass it?

Even if they were, there is something else about them: data comes necessarily from the past. Pretending to predict the future, “machine learning” algorithms will instead re-mix the past for you. They are conservative by nature.

Cory Doctorow makes this point, great as always:
http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

I agree Robert, and I like the idea of accurate vs inaccurate. Especially for those who do not know as much about how an algorithm works, this is a great starting point. The consideration can be extended to think about whether an inaccurate algorithm would impact people and what the ethics of that are. If a small inaccuracy can lead to large impacts, maybe that isn’t an area where an algorithm should be used. On the other hand, humans can also be inaccurate so perhaps an algorithm would help. As you mentioned the same can happen for accurate algorithms – I think it is a great starting place to begin discussing an algorithm.