21–30 of 295 posts
When I try it in both logged in and non-logged in mode I get reasonably similar results, the differences are mostly in the ordering. When I do the same on Bing I get about 20% or so pornographic images for both 'black girls' and 'white girls'.
The question is, should search algorithms show what currently is (and therefore reinforce what is), or what the culture aspires to (which in fact more accurately matches the culture in terms of desire and movement)? I think this is a pretty smart example of how the technology we use every day can be passively malevolent - creating hurdles for change rather than enabling better information transfer.
Google's search results is really the oldest analog we have for the "machine learning learns racism" quandary, too. This question is just going to get bigger, and its effects much more pernicious.
Try searching Google Images for "brazilian". Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly" optimize for a certain audience, you risk picking up the biases of that audience. So, if you want to appeal to a broader audience than your current one, you might need to manually tune your system to remove some of the biases from your original audience. This i…
Do we know if Google or tech in general hires black women less than proportional to the US population?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/06/30/google-d...
> Women made up 31% of Google employees in 2015, up one percentage point since 2014, according to statistics released by the Internet giant on Thursday. One in five technical hires were women in 2015, raising the number of women in technical roles to 19% from 18% in 2014 and 17% in 2013. In 2015, women held nearly a quarter of leadership posts at Google, up from 22% in 2014 and 21% in 2013.
> Google says it's also hiring more black and Hispanic workers: 4% of hires in 2015 were black and 5% were Hispanic. Hispanic employees in technical roles increased to 3% from 2%. But the increased hiring did not budge the overall percentage of underrepresented minorities in the Google workforce as total hiring rose, with Hispanics making up 3% of the work force and African Americans 2%.
Given that women are half the population, and African Americans and Hispanics each make up about 12%, we can state categorically that Google's hiring doesn't match the general US population.
Um, it's not "Google", it's "the content of the internet" that's biased - right?
Try searching Google Images for "brazilian". Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly" optimize for a certain audience, you risk picking up the biases of that audience. So, if you want to appeal to a broader audience than your current one, you might need to manually tune your system to remove some of the biases from your original audience. This i…
I think the real problem here is that Google, for all of its algorithmic might, is somehow powerless to create algorithms that don't have this problem in the first place. It signals to me that there aren't people thinking about this kind of stuff, both down in the trenches and in the upper echelons. Maybe it's as the author contends, a bigger issue with ethics in tech in general.
I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it? In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typicall…
Do we know if Google or tech in general hires black women less than proportional to the US population?