The axiomatic error is to believe that bias is something that can be isolated, abstracted, excoriated and fixed. The kernel function of logical system self-containment that compels the indefinitely-extensible combinatorial depth of communications (as information-encoding and processing) systems is grounded very much less upon certainty and teleological closure. Bias is in one way or another […]
Context: Cybernetics Film Festival – Minority Report Information is, among other things, a quantification of the difference between the current state of a system and its most probable state. Artificial Intelligence as proxy precognitive toolkit acquires utility and cultural – if not institutional – value as a function of the extent to which its models […]
Context: DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic The raw data is indeed endemically and intermittently toxic. Filtering out venomous misanthropy from the dataset is a solution but this also requires a language model that does something substantively more than generate probabilistic sequences of linguistic artefacts sans comprehension. John […]
Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]
Bias represents an interesting and potentially intractable problem. Regardless of how (or where) we seek to address or interdict it, there exists an intrinsic, endemic property of complex information and energy-processing (i.e. logical, material) systems that natively orients those entities towards abstraction, abbreviation and mnemonic compression. Bias is the persistence of logical errors that naturally […]
The bias in machine learning (and AI more generally) is the bias in data. The bias in data replicates the bias in ourselves, our distributed social and cultural information-processing systems, and in the natural orientation of complex information and energy-processing systems towards autonomous self-propagation through optimally-concise self-representational abstraction(s). Machine Learning applies mathematical heuristics to extract […]
Context: Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game Bias in AI only ever really focuses and amplifies existing inequality as a function and retrospective, combinatorial abbreviation of historical data. This itself is no great or new revelation: we generate automated decision-making systems that recursively reinforce aggregate cultural dependencies and […]
Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
For all our aspirations to escape the implicit biases and semantic turbulence of cognition, culture and the diverse linguistic or other semi-formal behavioural and conceptual encoding grammars we inhabit, there are very likely intrinsic symmetries in information and communications systems that orient them towards qualititatively dissonant outcomes. Biases are functional amplifications of difference and information […]
The problematic persistence of algorithmic bias is a mystery to me. Not, as it happens, because I am particularly baffled or confronted by this form of technological encoding and mediated emergence of core social and cultural inaccuracies, assumptions and deep-seated human insecurities. It is much simpler than that, in the end. Machine-intelligence powered classificatory systems […]
I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which […]
Some reflections occurred to me while listening to this Santa Fe Institute podcast today: Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice, What of questions concerning the nature of social, psychological and cultural value systems when considered as a unified whole? While it is clear that the aggregate macrostate of any particular system […]
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