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At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

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Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#81

Post by fit2rule »

coribuci wrote: post #68
t0astbread wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore) Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore). The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neut…

> Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore) Now you are being sexist. Of course Krankenschwester is used but it has a different meaning than Krankenbruder > Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore). In many languages…

I think you're right, but you're being downvoted by people who don't speak German and don't understand how "sexist" the language really is, even if Germans themselves are as enlightened on the subject as one could be.

People forget that English has reinvented itself for the last hundred years and it's not showing any signs of slowing down, whereas German-speaking culture is a little more resistant to the mores of newspeak. Until you lived and loved in both languages it's not really clear how equitable German culture is, in comparison to English. A German might say there is a level of respect in calling something feminine, whereas an English-only speaker might react with abhorrence. Such misunderstandings are to be expected across the language barrier.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#82

Post by rmrfstar »

Barrin92 wrote: post #63

> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they…

> at some point admit that we want machine learning algorithms to be able to interface with symbolic rules rather than pretending that everything is a data issue

That is a long way off. We find ourselves in a situation where we have models that do useful things, but are also horrendously biased.

If you want improvement now, the quickest way to get it is recasting benchmarks. Most NLP research groups just hill climb on GLUE or whatever. What gets measured gets managed, and bias is not being systematically measured.

Right now language models can't even compare ages that fall outside the 20-100 range, and it is really unlikely that we are going to quickly get to architectures with symbolic reasoning sophisticated enough to squelch bias.

To Google's credit, they are working to measure (and therefore manage) bias [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13283.pdf

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR8YSRcuVLE

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#83

Post by hndamien »

Barrin92 wrote: post #66
Tomte wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct). Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo. It…

The issue here is that grammatical gender is not useful information when reasoning about the semantics of some sentence. Toothpaste in German is grammatically female, that's not a reason for an ML system to make feminine assumptions about toothpaste after it combs through data, it has nothing to do with progressive values, it's that the ML system cannot distinguish between a spurious correlation and actual meaning. T…

Why does grammatical gender exist for toothpaste? I honestly don't understand this (English speaker).

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#84

Post by whatshisface »

three_seagrass wrote: post #75
whatshisface wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your activity in public places is personally identifiable.

Again, any website publishing your activity in public spaces is not entitled to linking it to your PII, because if they do deanonymize it, you now have means to take it down.

Your activity in public spaces is PII, it's as unique to you as your face.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#85

Post by t0astbread »

coribuci wrote: post #68
t0astbread wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore) Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore). The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neut…

> Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore) Now you are being sexist. Of course Krankenschwester is used but it has a different meaning than Krankenbruder > Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore). In many languages…

I'm not sure I totally understand what you're trying to communicate but I didn't say we need to invent gender neutral terms for every German word. I said formal German is moving away from describing people using words that only exist as either masculine or feminine. So depending on where you sample your data it's not unusual to encounter these speech patterns. (Of course, if an ML algorithm can pick that up is a different question.)

And (this is an opinion now) I don't think that's "disgusting". Agreed, it's kinda clunky to always mention both variants but stereotypes are subtle and this is one thing we can do that's not too invasive. Of course this isn't an ideal solution either because gender non-conformity exists and the German language has no good way of addressing a lot of that. (But there are deeper cultural problems there.)

Also, I'm not sure what you mean with "Krankenbruder" but it sounds like something from /r/ich_iel.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#86

Post by Isa_Memory »

mftrhu wrote: post #48
three_seagrass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to the police force surveillance, prejudicial bias is more a problem than a red herring. It's true that mass surveillance is an issue but how it is implemented can be an issue as well. I'm curious - how does a wealthy person retain their privacy from this type of mass surveillance but the working class does not?

Transportation and shopping come to mind. If you do most of your shopping online you will be less exposed to this kind of mass surveillance; conversely, if you have to use public transportation and walk around, you'll be more exposed to it: not "retain their privacy", but "retain more of their privacy". It's also possible that more affluent neighborhoods have fewer cameras.

'Accessibility, affordability, advertising, anonymity and anomie, are the five cylinders of the engine of mass addiction'

Um Another way to view... Let us take a quick look at a utopian idea: 'Does the government guarants me, that gains come without additional costs ?' (-;

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#87

Post by Tomte »

hndamien wrote: post #83
Barrin92 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is that grammatical gender is not useful information when reasoning about the semantics of some sentence. Toothpaste in German is grammatically female, that's not a reason for an ML system to make feminine assumptions about toothpaste after it combs through data, it has nothing to do with progressive values, it's that the ML system cannot distinguish between a spurious correlation and actual meaning. T…

Why does grammatical gender exist for toothpaste? I honestly don't understand this (English speaker).

Every noun has a grammatical gender in German. It just does. There does not need to be a (contemporary) reason.

Why does declination of nouns exist in German, is almost non-existant in English, more pronounced in Latin, and even more of it in Ancient Greek?

Is one of these languages defective? Should they shed their cases?

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#88

Post by hndamien »

Tomte wrote: post #87
hndamien wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does grammatical gender exist for toothpaste? I honestly don't understand this (English speaker).

Every noun has a grammatical gender in German. It just does. There does not need to be a (contemporary) reason. Why does declination of nouns exist in German, is almost non-existant in English, more pronounced in Latin, and even more of it in Ancient Greek? Is one of these languages defective? Should they shed their cases?

Maybe. I just can't wrap my head around what useful function they provide for communication. I'd love to be enlightened.
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