by Bozho | Nov 3, 2018 | Aggregated, ethics, machine learning, Opinions
Today I had a talk on OpenFest about algorithmic and technological transparency. It was a somewhat abstract and high-level talk but I hoped to make it more meaningful than if some random guy just spoke about techno-dystopias. I don’t really like these kinds of talks where someone who has no idea what a “training set” is, how dirty the data is and how to write five lines in Python talks about an AI revolution. But I think being a technical person let’s me put some details into the high-level stuff and make it less useless. The problem I’m trying to address is opaque systems – we don’t know how recommendation systems work, why are seeing certain videos or ads, how decisions are taken, what happens with our data and how secure the systems we use are, including our cars and future self-driving cars. Algorithms have real impact on society – recommendation engines make conspiracy theories mainstream, motivate fascists, create echo chambers. Algorithms decide whether we get loans, welfare, a conviction, or even if we get hit by a car (as in the classical trolley problem). How do we make the systems more transparent, though? There are many approaches, some overlapping. Textual description of how things operate, tracking the actions of back-office admins and making them provable to third parties, implementing “Why am I seeing this?”, tracking each step in machine learning algorithms, publishing datasets, publishing source code (as I’ve previously discussed open-sourcing some aspects of self-driving cars). We don’t have to reveal trade secrets and lose competitive advantage in order to be transparent. Transparency doesn’t have to come at...
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