Is Your AI Ethical?

 

[Pic Courtesy: Atlantic Re:think]

A group of teachers successfully sued the Houston Independent School District (HISD) in 2017 claiming their Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when the school district used an opaque artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to evaluate and terminate 221 teachers. The judge overturned the use of AI algorithms suggesting, “When a public agency adopts a policy of making high stakes employment decisions based on secret algorithms (aka, AI and Neural Networks) incompatible with a minimum due process, the proper remedy is to overturn the policy.”

The fields of computer modeled risk assessment and algorithmic decision making have been around for a while, but AI takes it to the next level – as demonstrated by Cambridge Analytica’s recent infamous work. AI is having an even bigger impact in our lives than that we find in movies like Terminator and I, Robot. While those movies suggest that the robots might end human freedom and control us – the biased, unfair, or downright unethical decision-making algorithms, automatically created and used by machines, pose a bigger risk to humanity.

Did Germany Cheat in World Cup 2014?

– By Andy Thurai (@AndyThurai)

This blog originally appeared on BigML blog site.

Now that I got your attention about Germany’s unfair advantage in the World Cup, I want to talk about how they used analytics to their advantage to win the World Cup—in a legal way.

I know the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind talking about unfair advantage is either performance-enhancing drugs (baseball & cycling) or SpyCam (football, NFL kind). Being a Patriots fan, it hurts to even write about SpyCam, but there are ways a similar edge can be gained without recording the opposing coaches’ signals or play calling.

It looks like Germany did a similar thing, legally, and had a virtual 12^th man on the field all the time. For those who don’t follow football (the soccer kind) closely, it is played with 11 players on the field.

So much has been spoken about Big Data, Analytics and Machine Learning from the technology standpoint. But the World Cup provided us all with an outstanding use case on the application of those technologies.

Read more of this blog.