Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#201

Post by beat » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #174

kareemsabri wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. I did read the article. It doesn’t support the conclusion OP is drawing. The aim of the AI is to “mechanize the search for talent”. It doesn’t care to, nor have any means to, make decisions “like the recruiters did”. Obviously machines don’t make decisions like humans do. They’re trying to reverse engineer an alternate decisions making process from the previous outcomes.

> The aim of the AI is to “mechanize the search for talent”. It doesn’t care to, nor have any means to, make decisions “like the recruiters did”. This is why AI is so confusing. All "AI" does is rapidly accelerate human decisions by not involving them, so that speed and consistency are guaranteed. They are not replacements for human decision making, they are replacements for human decision making at scale. If we can'…

This is all happening before the interview, even. The AI, as far as I can see from the article, was just sorting resumes into accept/reject piles, based on the kinds of resumes that led to hire/pass results in the hands of humans.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#202

Post by Dirlewanger » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #110

macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _technical_ positions like programming but find themselves being turned away by biased recruiters? I've never even seen somebody _claim_ that they were a woman who couldn't find a tech job, just people wondering where all the women were.

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#203

Post by louwrentius » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

fuscy wrote: post #25

The eye opening thing here is not that the AI failed, but why it failed. At start the AI is like a baby, it doesn't know anything or have any opinions. By teaching it using a set of data, in this case a set of resumes and the outcome then it can form an opinion. The AI becoming biased tells that the "teacher" was biased also. So actually Amazon's recruiting process seems to be a mess with the technical skills on the…

Thanks for spelling this out, I think this is exactly how to look at this.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#204

Post by beat » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

An untapped market of engineers would be tapped...

...if and only if...

...there were no other factors at play that cause that market to remain untapped.

For further rational thinking, consider this. If there's a bias, it doesn't mean women won't get hired. It just means they won't get hired for the best positions. Everyone else gets Amazon's cast-offs.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#205

Post by fromthestart » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

Things are going to get very interesting when AI inevitably reveals consistent differences in performance among genders.

There's only so much you can sweep under a rug.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#206

Post by beat » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

Dirlewanger wrote: post #202

commandlinefan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _technical_ positions like programming but find themselves being turned away by biased recruiters? I've never even seen somebody _claim_ that they were a woman who couldn't find a tech job, just people wondering where all the women were.

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.

But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers?

Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#207

Post by beat » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #194

Marazan wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it. That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen. But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.

Do you really think white men care so much about keeping down other groups of people that they would prioritize it over making more money and having more access to good workers? That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

It doesn't need to be deliberate or conscious. It can be incidental.

Or maybe women just aren't as smart as men.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#208

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

Marazan wrote: post #192

macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it. That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen. But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#209

Post by joshuamorton » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #123

kareemsabri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion. There is no reason to assume the AI’s assessment methods will mirror those of the recruiters. If Amazon did most of it’s hiring when programming was a task primarily performed by men, and so Amazon didn’t receive many female applicants, they could be unbiased while still amassing a data set that skewed heavily male. The machine would then just correctly assess that fem…

Control question for if you're making a certain intellectual mistake. The data set will also have skewed heavily against people named "David". Probably only ~1% of the successful applicants. Would you also expect the machine to be biased against candidates named David?

This isn't correct, the worry isn't that a single group is small, its that a single group is large. (basically if one group is large, you can get by ignoring all the smaller groups).

This is most common with binary problems.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#210

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #27

exo762 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not "women are just not as interested in math, logic and computer science to pursue it AS OFTEN as men"? Why are you not considering this possibility?

Ah, the Damore argument. Besides the fact that his psuedo science has been summarily handled[0], to consider his argument you then have to equally consider the possibility of sexism in academia pressuring women to not study these subjects and societal pressure their whole lives pressuring them to not persue these career paths. There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role m…

Well... why is it, then, that underrepresentation of women must suggest sexism, but the (orders of magnitude higher) overrepresentation of asians - specifically from India - doesn't suggest bias?