Question

Weapons of Math Destruction

The proliferation of WMDs seems to stem from our innate attraction to numeric rankings. Often, an “anti” WMD would require significant investment of time, money, and human capital to evaluate whatever metric (teacher performance, expected criminal recidivism, credit history etc.) is currently being assessed by a WMD. Is there a scale on which we believe we can replace the efficiency of WMDs with the more expensive alternative? Are algorithms our only answer to tackling big data?

Answer 1

One of the major problems with our blind trust in algorithms is that we can propagate discriminatory patterns without acknowledging any kind of intent.

Because we have an algorithm that does it, we can point to the algorithm and say, “We’re trusting this algorithm, and therefore this algorithm is responsible for its own fairness.” It’s kind of a way of distancing ourselves from the question of responsibility.

Algorithms are currently the only answer to tackling big data, but what needs to be changed is to not take algorithms as black boxes, rather, be aware of what the algorithm is doing so as to avoid the issues described in the first couple of paragraphs.