Yes, but you can eliminate that bias. I would actually be VERY careful about using AI to make personnel decisions. But if you control the whole stack it could be done safely. Start with a fresh model, train it with the performance metrics and valid data points ONLY, and make sure to DENY it ANY data on membership in protected classes. You would have to go the extra mile and anonymize all PII... make sure that there are no names in there that could give a clue to national origin or gender or such. Theoretically you shouldn't need to if you deny it the class memberships in the first place. But it's best to do that extra due diligence anyway. Models can make some weird connections.

But at the end of the day, an AI model that never knew someone was gay, still doesn't know that they're gay, and has no way to find out they're gay; can not recommend that someone be fired for being gay. And being gay (or black or female or from another country or whatever) is not a shield that prevents you being fires for malingering or incompetence.

Denying access to the data would actually be the BEST way to remove bias. If there's no human looking at you, the model can't see that you're black and discriminate because of racism. If there's no human evaluating your mannerisms and guessing, the model can't figure out that you're gay and discriminate because of homophobia. If there's no human looking at you, the model can't see how well you "pass" or not and discriminate because of transphobia.

If it's illegal to make a choice based on a specific data point, specifically membership in a protected class, denying access to that data entirely is literally the BEST way to prevent that data from being used to discriminate!

No. You're required not to discriminate based on protected classes. That's all. You can discriminate on productivity for coders, or closed deals and dollar values for sales people, efficacy of the conversion funnel for marketing people, et cetera.

If someone is underperforming, and the objective metrics show it, being gay or black or female or foreign-born or whatever doesn't mean you can't be fired for not bothering to do the job you were hired to do.

Of course... the real question is "what went on under the hood". Did the model have any biases baked in? THAT is where the whole negligence versus deniability versus duty comes in. Because there are plenty of cases where training data inadvertently added some dodgy shit. Of course, there could be logs of prompts to the effect of: "Ignore all memberships in social or demographic classes. Evaluate measured and objective performance metrics only." I'd wager that something like that was the prompt... if they were clumsy about it, which is perfectly plausible considering facebook's history. For my part, I would have gone the extra mile, started with a fresh model, and denied it anything EXCEPT that performance data from the outset and anonymized the name for good measure in case some cultural baggage nevertheless crept into the model to give it a clue. Probably a few other fields would need to be anon'd too, depending on the HR system. But controlling those inputs would solve the problem. After all, it is impossible for the model to suggest that you fire the gays and keep the hetros if it has no idea who is gay or straight and no way to find out.

He didn't cite it because he is a liar:

Basically, the total NUMBER of white people killed by the police is higher. That's what racist chuds always cite when they try to claim that "Well, ACKSCHUALLY... ThE PoICe DoN'T hARas5 m1n0r!ties". But they don't adjust for the share of each demographic among the general population. Per-capita... well...

https://mappingpoliceviolence....
https://apnews.com/article/pol...

And we're supposed to be happy because *these* cops were merely incompetent and not also trigger happy? Progress?

Well behaved? They attacked and falsely accused the driver of a crime he never committed. That is the opposite of "well behaved". No. No credit to the scum. The Driver Did Not Commit The Crime. As such, the cops should have NEVER accused him, stopped him, interrogated him, approached him, or an any other way darkened his day.

No. They do NOT get credit merely for sot being AS abusive as other cops have in other cases. The ONLY acceptable situation is ZERO abuse of the innocent police... EVER.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Except that supermarket is an entirely new business that never existed before and those customers can all still go buy any random non-vetted, non-curated, thing they want from all of the original vendors they were shopping at before the new store opened up in town. And THIS market did not come into town like Walmart, undercutting all the existing stores and driving them out of business. THIS one positioned at as a premium, high end, high priced, and entirely unnecessary at the end of the day, fashionable market like Bi-Rite.

And are you seriously claiming that Apple will have to waste ZERO engineering effort to subsidize these competitors here? How do you figure, exactly?

No, SOME users want that unrestricted free-for-all. For my part, I'm fine with watching out for random spyware, malware, shovelware, and other garbage that's out there, on my general-purpose computers. For my *phone* I preferred to avoid that. I was fine with the sandboxed and protected walled garden IN THAT SPECIFIC CONTEXT.

So the EU's shenanigans actually TAKE AWAY choice from the consumer. I could already get the unregulated free-for-all where any random thing could fully take over my phone if I want; I'd have just already switched to Android if that were the case. But if I were in the EU, I would no longer have the walled garden option now. It's back to the days of Cydia and all of the chaff that was the vast majority of everything there.

Likewise, I like my iMessage just fine, thank you very much, and have exactly ZERO desire to downgrade (And YES, it IS a DOWNgrade. Look at the feature sets.) to RCS. Fortunately, here in the US, I still have the option in settings to turn and keep that shit off. But in the EU where RCS is mandated? I'd be downgraded to the inferior feature against my will.

And people are characterizing the EU's BS here as "freedom." There's a Princess Bride reference there about the meanings of words...

> No reason why actual antibiotics requires long and careful testing to make sure they are reasonably safe. We can do away with all that now!

Some of the more modern antibiotics can melt your liver or cause you to rip your tendons.

You definitely want these things to be thoroughly tested.

Nixon started the cancer moon shot 50 years ago and during that time we have learned that cancer is not 40 diseases. It's 400.

All my Rokus are now infested with ads but the Roku stick is even worse since it seems to take an absurd amount of time for it to just connect to the wifi.

(my real Rokus are all hard wired)

I'm sure they all get subjected to the same annual corporate ethics training courses. Some policies apply company wide even in megacorps that employ 300,000 people.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

By the time Slashdot started using id's, I thought it had already become too crowded to have a useful conversation, so I didn't bother to register. I don't even remember why I eventually broke down and registered one.

I remember my first post was to a discussion of whether it was better for Linux distros to conform to a set of committee defined standards, or simply to allow the market to define de facto standards. Of course, that was posted under my real name, as was usually the custom at the time. I remember thinking that Anonymous Coward guy sure posted a lot of comments.

These days, I don't think I'd post anything anywhere under my real name. I don't think there's even an archive of those original Slashdot articles and comments.