To think sexism and racism are inevitable

[jcyclops]

BBC News Link
An algorithm that was being tested as a recruitment tool by online giant Amazon was sexist and had to be scrapped, according to a Reuters report. Reuters was told by members of the team working on it that the system effectively taught itself that male candidates were preferable.

My first thought on reading about this was OOOPS!
But does it have a deeper message that sexism and racism are inevitable and we have to find ways to work around the problem rather than find a cure.

Without any information about how or why the tool ‘taught itself’ to do this, how are we supposed to comment?

Look at the gender of the people who built the system! An algorithm is only as biased as either its curators or the data it is fed and I am going to bet less than half of their programmers are female.

Presumably it self taught because it was accessing huge amounts of data of real human interactions. So it's reflecting back what people actually think, not deriving sexism and racism from first principles.

we have to find ways to work around the problem rather than find a cure.

What does this even mean? Sounds like management speak.

OR... God forbid, they were the best candidates. Maybe as individuals, maybe ‘as a class’. If a certain age or demographic will provide your business with the best investment, they might objectively be the best people to hire. There’s absolutely no reason they should be ethnically, sexually or religiously equally divided! The AI is doing its job!

iismum is right.

I’m not sure what even your post or the fact that these things are inevitable even mean? Do you mean that they’re so guaranteed or so natural that we should be more accepting of them or expect them? Because the ability for us to be arseholes to each other does not make it acceptable at any level

Bit odd to derive racism from that?

Because the machines work with the data they're given. If the data is biased or skewed in some way, it's results will be the same.