Our pigs don't look as good as [generic Hollywood actor]

Thank you, this is why I came to the Fediverse from Reddit.

Critical thinking spotted, proper authorities have been notified.

We will fix you!

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It reminds me of the debate around self driving cars. Tesla has a flawed implementation of self driving tech, that’s trying to gather all the information it needs through camera inputs vs using multiple sensor types. This doesn’t always work, and has led to some questionable crashes where it definitely looks like a human driver could have avoided the crash.

However, even with Tesla’s flawed self driving, They’re supposed to have far fewer wrecks than humans driving. According to Tesla’s safety report, Tesla’s in self driving mode average 5-6 million miles per accident vs 1-1.5 million miles for Tesla drivers not using self driving (US average is 500-750k miles per accident).

So a system like this doesn’t have to be perfect to do a far better job than people can, but that doesn’t mean it won’t feel terrible for the unlucky people who things go poorly for.

Could a human have judged it better? Maybe not. I think a better question to ask is, “Should anyone be sent back into a violent domestic situation with no additional protection, no matter the calculated risk?” And as someone who has been on the receiving end of that conversation and later narrowly escaped a total-family-annihilation situation, I would say no…no one should be told that, even though they were in a terrifying, life-threatening situation, they will not be provided protection, and no further steps will be taken to keep them from being injured again, or from being killed next time. But even without algorithms, that happens constantly…the only thing the algorithm accomplishes is that the investigator / social worker / etc doesn’t have to have any kind of personal connection with the victim, so they don’t have to feel some kind of way for giving an innocent person a death sentence because they were just doing what the computer told them to.

Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.

My impression from the article is more that they’re not doing any kind of garbage-in assessment: nobody is making sure they’re getting answers about the right person (eg: some women date more than one guy) and some women don’t feel safe giving accurate answers to the police, and there aren’t good failsafes available for when it’s wrong; you’re forced to hire legal counsel and pursue a change via the courts.

An algorithm is never to blame, some pencil necked desk jockey decided the criteria to get help that was used to create the algorithm, the blame is entirely on them.

That said, I doubt it would make any difference if a human was in the loop. An algorithm is still al algorithm, even if it’s applied by a human. We usually just call that a “policy” though. People have been murdered by the paper sea for decades before we started calling it “algorithms”.

The article is not about how the AI is responsible for the death. It’s likely that the woman would have died in the counterfactual.

The question is not “how effective is AI”? The question is should life or death decisions be made by an electrified Oracle at Delphi. You must answer this question before “is AI effective” becomes relevant.

If somebody was adjudicating traffic court with Tarot cards, would you ask: well how accurate are the cards compared to a judge?

The crucial point is: 8% of the decisions turn out to be wrong or misjudged.

The article says:

Yet roughly 8 percent of women who the algorithm found to be at negligible risk and 14 percent at low risk have reported being harmed again, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the system.

Granted, neither “negligible” or “low risk” means “no risk”, but I think 8% and 14% are far too high numbers for those categories.

Furthermore, there’s this crucial bit:

At least 247 women have also been killed by their current or former partner since 2007 after being assessed by VioGén, according to government figures. While that is a tiny fraction of gender violence cases, it points to the algorithm’s flaws. The New York Times found that in a judicial review of 98 of those homicides, 55 of the slain women were scored by VioGén as negligible or low risk for repeat abuse.

So in the 98 murders they reviewed, the algorithm put more than 50% of them at negligible or low risk for repeat abuse. That’s a fucking coin flip!

Is there evidence that a human would have judged those cases differently?

It implies that a human would have been worse. Or at least that an average human would be worse, the ones making the decision.

Here’s another quote further down:

Since 2007, about 0.03 percent of Spain’s 814,000 reported victims of gender violence have been killed after being assessed by VioGén, the ministry said. During that time, repeat attacks have fallen to roughly 15 percent of all gender violence cases from 40 percent, according to government figures.

“If it weren’t for this, we would have more homicides and gender-based violence,” said Juan José López Ossorio, a psychologist who helped create VioGén and works for the Interior Ministry.

So no, not a scandal, it seems it is helping, but perhaps could be better. At least that’s my read.

Capitalism.

People are complicated creatures that can’t be easily fit into niche categories despite our brains need to do so.

Culture.

Pretty much anything trying to predict human behavior is a heuristic; people using them as if they’ve got some kind of certainty is a problem.

Why not both? A bad algorithm based on bad heuristics? There are many many algorithms that fail at what they’re supposed to do.

As a non-condescending “mathematician”, I’m happy to help.

And that’s why I’m against ALL such things.

Not because they can’t be done right and you can’t teach people to use them.

But because there’s a slippery slope of human nature where people want to offload the burden of decision to a machine, an oracle, a die, a set of bird intestines. The genie is out and they will do that again and again, but in a professional organization, like police, one can make a decision of creating fewer opportunities for such catastrophes.

The rule is that people shouldn’t use machines above their brains, as one other commenter says, and they should only use this in a logical OR with their own judgment made earlier, as another commenter says, but the problem is in human nature and I’d rather not introduce this particular point of failure to police, politics, anything juridical and military.

Even when given the best and most sophisticated tools and equipment available, police will manage to fuck things up at every opportunity because they’re utterly incompetent.

But the system seems to be better than police officers. Which is entirely believable. Humans have all kinds of biases that make the decisions we make far less than desirable.

Per the article, it has decreased the risk of repeated violence and, according to an expert, its the best systen we have. Why would you want to go back to a worse system? This is using our brains in an attempt to overcoming our biases.

But that doesn’t save money and the only reason the capitalists want AI is saving money

I don’t think there’s any AI involved. The article mentions nothing of the sort, it’s at least 8 17 years old (according to the article) and the input is 35 yes/no questions, so it’s probably just some points assigned for the answers and maybe some simple arithmetic.

Edit: Upon a closer read I discovered the algorithm was much older than I first thought.

// Pseudo code
risk = 0
if (Q1 == true) {
    risk += 20
}
if (Q2 == true) {
    risk += 10
}
// etc...
// Maybe throw in a bit of
if (Q28 == true) {
    if (Q22 == true and Q23 == true) {
        risk *= 1.5
    } else {
        risk += 10
    }
}

// And finally, evaluate the risk:
if (risk < 10) {
    return "negligible"
} else if (risk >= 10 and risk < 40) {
    return "low risk"
}
// etc... You get the picture.

Oh, it’s far worse than that… the value of our lives have been determined by the (so-called) “free market” for a very long time now.

The machine is simply going to streamline the process.

per the article, it’s rather better than that.

It’s a sentiment at least as old as the first things that we now call computers.

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

—Charles Babbage

Sounds like a triage situation. That really sucks for the women affected.

Is it really too much to want enough resources to respond appropriately to all cases?

Cracked me up thanks!

Algorithms aren’t AI. They’re standardization measures in cases like this. Hell you don’t even need computers for many of them. We use tons in healthcare to classify risk, decide on treatment options, and even decide on how much medication to give. They’re particularly present in psychiatric care.