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Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

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Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#141

Post by kazinator »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #112
genewitch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been getting a real "well, they deserved it" vibe off this site tonight. Thanks for not being that way.

The user base for this site is incredibly privileged. Not meant as a judgement just a stated observation.

Speaking of which, I more accurately should have stated that even people from a higher earning working class are not going to sue. Suing requires not only a commitment of cash, but time. People who work don't have the time; especially if they have children. It's a gamble; what if you lose?

Litigation is mainly a form of sport available to and enjoyed by the rich. And I mean serious litigation like taking on some corporation with deep pockets; not pick-on-someone-your-own-size litigation as in neighbor cut down a tree which fell onto your toolshed.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#142

Post by bluefirebrand »

thunky wrote: post #134
bluefirebrand wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sort of the whole point though The computer allows the humans a lot of leeway. For one thing, the computer represents a large diffusion of responsibility. Do you hold the programmers responsible? The managers who told them to build the software? How about the hardware manufacturers or the IT people who built or installed the system? Maybe the Executives? What if the program was built with all good intentions a…

That's fair but I was referering to the humans that delegate "business decisions" to computers, which is what I thought the context was... For example, if American Airlines uses a computer to help decide who gets refunds, they can't then blame the computer when it discriminates against group X, or steals money, because it was their own "business decision" that is responsible for that action (with the assist from a st…

> For example, if American Airlines uses a computer to help decide who gets refunds, they can't then blame the computer when it discriminates against group X

If American Airlines uses a computer to automatically decline refunds, which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions?

The engineers who built the system?

The product people who designed the system, providing the business rules that the engineers followed?

The executives who oversaw the whole thing?

Sometimes there is one person who you can pin blame on, who was responsible for "going rogue" and building some discrimination into the system

Often time it is a failure of a large part of a business. Responsibility is diffused enough that no one is accountable, and essentially we do in fact "blame the computer"

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#143

Post by kazinator »

roenxi wrote: post #100
kazinator wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad decisions in insurance are, roughly speaking, on the side of over-approving. AI will perform tirelessly and consistently at maximizing rejections. It will leave no stone unturned in search for justifications why a claim ought to be denied.

That isn't what the incentives point too; in a free market the insurers are aligned to accuracy. An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers - what is the point of taking out a policy if you expect the insurer to be unreasonable about paying? It'd take an odd customer to sign up for that. If they over-approve they will be unprofitable because their premiums aren't high…

What if it isn't actually a free market?

Secondly, the reasonablity or unreasonability of payouts is linked to premiums.

In other words, one way that the parsimonious insurer would still have customers is that they offer low premiums compared to the liberal insurers.

Even people who know about the bad anecdotes from reading online reviews will brush that aside for the better deal. (Hey, reviews are biased toward negativity and miss the other side of the story; chances are that wouldn't happen to me.)

The free market doesn't optimize for quality. Firstly, it optimizes for the lowest price for a given level of quality. But the price optimization has a second-order effect of a downward pressure on quality.

If you're selling something and the margin is optimized: it's about as cheap as can be, what you can do is reduce quality by some epsilon, and make a corresponding decrease in price. It still looks like about the same quality to someone not using a magnifying glass and fine-toothed comb, and you have temporary price edge against competitors. That triggers a kind of "gradient descent" of declining quality which bottoms out at some minimum level of quality below which viability starts to get eroded past a point where the market still finds the thing acceptable.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#144

Post by thunky »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #142
thunky wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair but I was referering to the humans that delegate "business decisions" to computers, which is what I thought the context was... For example, if American Airlines uses a computer to help decide who gets refunds, they can't then blame the computer when it discriminates against group X, or steals money, because it was their own "business decision" that is responsible for that action (with the assist from a st…

> For example, if American Airlines uses a computer to help decide who gets refunds, they can't then blame the computer when it discriminates against group X If American Airlines uses a computer to automatically decline refunds, which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions? The engineers who built the system? The product people who designed the system, providing the business rules that the engineers foll…

> which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions?

Personally I'd be satisfied holding the company as a whole liable rather than a single person.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#145

Post by const_cast »

chii wrote: post #65
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an underlying assumption there that is certainly incorrect. So many stupid comments about AI boil down to "humans are incredibly good at X, we can't risk having AI do it". Humans are bad at all manner of things. There are all kinds of bad human decisions being made in insurance, health care, construction, investing, everywhere. It's one big joke to suggest we are good at all this stuff.

The fear is that by delegating to an ai, there's no recourse if the outcome for the person is undesirable (correctly or not). What is needed from the AI is a trace/line-of-reasoning to which a decision is derived. Like a court judgement, which has explanations attached. This should be available (or be made as part of the decision documentation).

The danger is that AI can be biased, so if we don't know how it's making it's decisions it could be stupid.

I mean, imagine that making an insurance claim with a black-sounding name results in a 5% greater chance of being rejected. How would we even know if this is the case? And, how do we prevent that?

Now, of course humans are biased too, but there's no guarantee that the biases of humans are the same as the biases of whatever AI model is chosen. And with humans we can hold them accountable to some degree. We need that accountability with AI agents.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#146

Post by const_cast »

roenxi wrote: post #100
kazinator wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad decisions in insurance are, roughly speaking, on the side of over-approving. AI will perform tirelessly and consistently at maximizing rejections. It will leave no stone unturned in search for justifications why a claim ought to be denied.

That isn't what the incentives point too; in a free market the insurers are aligned to accuracy. An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers - what is the point of taking out a policy if you expect the insurer to be unreasonable about paying? It'd take an odd customer to sign up for that. If they over-approve they will be unprofitable because their premiums aren't high…

> An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers

If it's health insurance, it's not a free market. You don't have a choice. It's employer provided, so suck it up buttercup.

It's just socialized medicine but implemented in the private sector and, like, 100x more shit.

UHC, one of the largest insurers in the US, has a claim denial rate somewhere in the 30s if I remember correctly. Well... that sucks.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#147

Post by rpdillon »

guappa wrote: post #97
JimDabell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge amount of spam never makes it into spam folders; it’s discarded silently.

If you use microsoft outlook most of the spam never makes it into the spam folder because it goes to the inbox. Do you have a source for your somewhat unbelievable claim?

You need to read through wikipedia's article on anti-spam techniques! There are whole categories of techniques that require no intervention from humans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#148

Post by danielmarkbruce »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #109
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sure, but at least with encryption, someone can demonstrate how the result was reached, since the result is based on a formula. With AI, people seem perfectly happy to be building a black box and just hoping for good result. We also don't abdicate our decision-making to encryption processes.

Read a little bit about key generation.

We abdicate decision making to random processes in many places. Quant finance, all kinds of physical processes simulation and optimization where decisions are made in real time by systems (like oil refineries).

And really, AI models are only black boxes in the aggregate. You can go through and understand every single calculation. You can understand it in training (except perhaps at initialization), you can understand it in inference (except perhaps if you want to use randomness in sampling). I'd suggest that Google Search pre-ML was a black box in the aggregate too... no one could really understand it all.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#149

Post by bluefirebrand »

thunky wrote: post #144
bluefirebrand wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if American Airlines uses a computer to help decide who gets refunds, they can't then blame the computer when it discriminates against group X If American Airlines uses a computer to automatically decline refunds, which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions? The engineers who built the system? The product people who designed the system, providing the business rules that the engineers foll…

> which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions? Personally I'd be satisfied holding the company as a whole liable rather than a single person.

What does it mean to hold "a company" liable?

All that does is create a situation where decision makers at companies can make the company behave unethically or even illegally and suffer no repercussions for this. They might not even still be at the company when the consequences are finally felt

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#150

Post by thunky »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #149
thunky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions? Personally I'd be satisfied holding the company as a whole liable rather than a single person.

What does it mean to hold "a company" liable? All that does is create a situation where decision makers at companies can make the company behave unethically or even illegally and suffer no repercussions for this. They might not even still be at the company when the consequences are finally felt

> What does it mean to hold "a company" liable?

It means that the company is sued and is responsible for damages.

> decision makers at companies can make the company behave unethically or even illegally and suffer no repercussions for this

But now you've just argued yourself back to the "which human(s) do we hold accountable for these decisions?" question you raised that I was trying to get you out of.

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