And. She knew something if we are attacked it is for our values for our taste for freedom but this possibility on our soil the belief really not to give in to any mind of terror so i say it with great clarity once again we will not give in european leaders a reintroducing strict measures and response arising Coronavirus Infections spains kaslow new region assessing its borders for 15 days france has gone into a month Long National lockdown and germany has announced nation wide restrictions president on trump and his democratic challenger joe biden have been holding competing rallies in the background stays in florida where just 5 days to go until the u. S. Election a record breaking 80000000 americans have already cost in person or mail in votes. Newspapers and n. G. O. S among locations raided by indian authorities alleging customary separatist activities the National Investigation agency seize documents and devices from the homes and offices of journalists and prominent activists its been criticized as a crackdown on dissent over engine rule in the disputed territory at least 6 people are dead and millions are without power after hurricanes eesa hit the Southern United States it made landfall in louisiana as a category 2 storm on wednesday and has left a trail of damage through several states as it moves northeast flooding and damage to infrastructure have sparked fears of to struction to election day polling next week those are the headlines news continues here on out as there are all hail the algorithm. Its one of the most consequential elections in u. S. History and al jazeera will be there every step of the way 9 hours of live coverage up to the minute results as they come in with correspondents across the u. S. And the rest of the world aljazeera brings you a unique global perspective on the u. S. Elections 2020. Trust is fundamental to all our relationships not just with our family and friends we trust banks with our money we trust doctors without really personal information. But what happens to trust in a world driven by algorithms as more and more decisions are made for us by these complex piece of code the question that comes up is inevitable can we trust algorithms. From google searches to g. P. S. Navigation algorithms are everywhere we dont really think too much about them but increasingly governments cooper ations and various institutions are using them to make decisions about who gets Public Services who gets to nod how people are monitored and policed how insurance is charged. I want to start here in australia where an algorithm used by the government has resulted in more than 400000 people being in debt to the countries welfare system centrally its been called the road at scandal. Back in 2016 a decision was made to fully automate a key part of these stray and welfare system the part where the earnings of low income people are compared with the amount of government money they received the government says they do this to ensure the right amount of Financial Assistance has been that all the data matching algorithm officially called the on line compliance intervention. Had been in place since 2011 any discrepancies previously flagged by the system were investigated by government employees. With automation all human checks were removed the government had instituted an algorithm that essentially said lets match 2 lots of data together and mash them together and see if people have a dead cert some of the math was just bad just plain wrong like it was spread shapes the mashing the cells together in the cells to chop actual is a generalist whos been reporting on the road story since it broke shes also an activist one of the chief organizes of the not why did ross Roots Campaign often people didnt realize that this was automated in the 1st place and it wasnt till we started getting people talking together on social media on twitter that we realized. Actually its the government has found it was almost like a 100000. 00 people have been gaslighted into thinking theyd done the wrong thing that it was their fault and their outrage when they realised that there was a fault in the actual algorithm in the car and the Australian Government disagrees we are doing. What. We are. And we. Are more chicks is a bit of an understatement the old system resulted in around 20000 descript c notices a year but in the early days of the new Automated System that jumped 220008 week. More than a 1000000 letters have been sent out by the algorithm sometimes disputing government payments from a spa back a city and what was even worse was the systems were imposed on paper with intellectual disabilities with homelessness with. Is a Chronic Health issues people who you know were barely literate or not literate all people who didnt know how to use a Computer People who were living in remote communities without access to internet people who just had no bloody clue how to deal with this sort of administrative bureaucratic. David begnaud was notified he correctly declared his income from a teaching job while he was on a disability pension back in 2011. d 4088. 00 innocence or rather he visits its going on at his action toward you that your son had done the wrong thing i know i had all i want to details or did and i was told i couldnt have that and the reason i was taught was that the computer post move and then sources appears to mean. Another person here another person in the business and they cant provide all that to me is a comes in to many places and it was simple but in other words the older rhythm is inscrutable its totally normal even the staff dont really understand it broken can you tell me how much evidence or how much notification to send only provide you proving that there was a day when you mean anything other than this election and think that i have finally my text message. To say hi the money you our us is doing today. The fact that you couldnt get any concrete evidence about this is how we have calculated your days here is what you hear the hours you work. That really i found. It sure any confidence that i had in the government will do the right thing the fact that i couldnt prove to me that i owed the money. Really concerned me you know find that youre seeing a letter in the mail that is generated by an ai that essentially says the government wants to let you know that we under paging by you know 5000 dollars or that you should have been eligible for the services that we didnt tell you therefore were telling you now and we can back pay normally gets back had in fact youre only eligible for like back pay i think its 6 weeks of government service. Says that the government can robo dating back for many many is automation computerize ation algorithm a ties ation if thats even a word theyre always sold to us as such a positive thing all upside no downside as a stroll is department of Human Services put it computerized Decision Making can reduce red tape ensure decisions are consistent and create greater efficiencies for recipients and the department the problem is how the challenge a system that has no facts no name and no besides the bottom of your letter say you know im in charge of this. Good afternoon welcome to the department of Human Services center like on a good day heated up sitting on hold for a couple hours to speak to a human the real question is how does it come about that the government has either pay people but billions. Because really. The criminal waste is occurring at the end of the governments line its the government thats doing this otherwise youre saying 100000 citizens have made mistakes thats the case then the system is too difficult for people to negotiate so im not here shaking my fist at technology its not digitals fall its not computers fault this system has been you know designed you know quite explicitly you know by government governments responsible for its failures and governments are really responsible for the hell theyre putting all sorts of welfare recipients through unfairly by issuing them for. This is something i heard from virtually everyone i spoke to about wrote it they said were not against technology its not like algorithms are all bad its the people and the institutions designing these codes we cant seem to trust and this really gets to the heart of our relationship with algorithms there are often complex hidden behind walls of secrecy with no way for those whose lives are actually impacted by them to probe them because theyve been kept off limits. Despite all the criticism and even a formal inquiry is trolling government stands by its algorithm and automation in the welfare system. We do not compliant. While. We pick out the 300000000. 00. Through that. And we will continue with. There are at least 20 different laws in australia that explicitly enable algorithms to make decisions previously made by ministers will start we dont really know the full extent of how these are being applied but there are places around the world where the use of algorithms are even more widespread. Like here in the United States where algorithms are being used to make Big Decisions across everything from the criminal Justice System Health Education and employees. And the United States has a longer history of algorithm use than many other countries Silicon Valley is a big reason for that of course but also theres much looser regulation here on how private companies and governments can collect and use data before theyre studying the effects of algorithms on American Society one thing is clear often its poor marginalized to get the west to. My my way or no prochoice in new york state to me weve been ginning you think shes the authority on everything to do with the automated inequality is actually the title of one of the books the genius says americas poor and working class have long been subject to invasive surveillance and punitive policies she writes about prison like poor houses of the 19th century the bad conditions with thought to discourage undeserving poor from supposedly taking advantage of the system. What i see as being part of the digital poorhouse are things like automated Decision Making tools statistical models that make risk predictions about how people are going to behave in the future or algorithms that match people to resources and the reason i think of them as a digital poor house is because that the decision that we made an 820. 00 to build actual poorhouses was a decision that Public Service systems should 1st and foremost be moral thermometers that they should act to decide who is most deserving of receiving their basic human rights the genius studies into the automation of Public Services in the United States points to developments in the late sixtys and seventys along with the Civil Rights Movement came a push for welfare rights people are forced to live in the most human situations because of poverty africanamericans and unmarried women who were previously bought from receiving public funds could now demand state support when they need to do it. Well technology was touted as a way to distribute Financial Aid more efficiently it almost immediately began to serve as a tool to limit the number of people getting support so you have this moment in history where theres a recession and a backlash against social spending and social movement thats winning successes that and discriminatory treatment and there really is no way to close the roles they cant close the roles the way they had in the past which is just discriminating against people and thats the moment we see these tools start to be integrated into public assistance i think its really important to understand that history i think too often we think of the systems us just simple administrative upgrades sort of natural and inevitable but in fact there are systems that make really important conflict. Political decisions for us and they were from the beginning supposed to solve political problems among them the power and the solidarity of poor working people in the only 970 s. Close to 50 percent of those living below the poverty line in the United States receive some form of cash welfare from the government today its less than 10 percent in public assistance the assumption of many folks who have not had direct experience with these systems is that theyre set up to help you succeed they are not in fact set up to say help you succeed and theyre very complicated systems that are very diversionary that are needlessly complex and that are incredibly stigmatizing and emotionally very difficult so it shouldnt then surprise us that a tool that makes that system faster. More efficient and more Cost Effective furthers that purpose of diverting people from the resources that they that they need having algorithms make decisions such as who gets Financial Aid who owes money back to the government has caused concern among many different groups but whats causing a full on panic for some is the fact that algorithms are being used to actually make predictions about people one of the most controversial examples is the correctional offender management profiling for alternative sanctions its a bit of a mouthful but it sure is compass and its an algorithm thats been used in courtrooms across the country to assist judges during sentencing now of course algorithms caught way up arguments analyze evidence or assess remorse but what they are be used for is to produce something known as a Risk Assessment school to predict the likelihood of a defendant committing another crime in the future the school is then used by judges to help determine who should be released and who should be detained pending trial. Now the judge has to consider a couple factors here theres Public Safety and flight risk on the one hand but then there are the real costs social and financial of the tension on the defendant on their family on the other now historically what happens is the judge looks into the defendants eyes and tries to say ok youre a high risk person or youre a low risk person i trust your i dont trust you now what algorithms are helping us to do is make those decisions better the compass algorithm was brought in to offset balance out inconsistency is in human judgment the assumption being of course that a piece of code would always be less biased and less susceptible to prejudice however compass is faced several criticisms primarily accusations of racial bias in accuracy and lack of transparency in 2016 a man named eric loomis sentenced to 6 years in prison took his case to the wood sconce and state Supreme Court his allegation was that the use of compass violated his right to due process it made it impossible for him to appeal his sentence since the algorithm is a black box impenetrable unquestionable. Eric loomis didnt get very far the Supreme Court ruled the use of compass in his sentencing was legal the verdict tell about revealed the ways in which the ever increasing use of algorithms is being normalized the court had a funny argument saying that nobody knows where these decisions are coming from and so its its ok you know its not that the state has some particular advantage over the defendant but that everyone is that this sort of equal Playing Field and its not that theres an informational advantage for one side or the other to me i find that somewhat dissatisfied and i do think that in these high stakes decisions particular in the criminal Justice System we dont just want to have an equal Playing Field of no one knows but i think we need to have an equal Playing Field of Everybody Knows we need to have this transparency built they didnt. System for the record equivalent the company that sells Compass Software has defended its algorithm it points to research commissioned that the Company Meets industry standards for fantasy and accuracy whether compass or most of the privately developed algorithms meet acceptable standards for transparency is another question even when they are used in the provision of Public Services algorithms are often closed to the public they cannot be scrutinized regardless of that sharon says that in certain cases he would still be comfortable being judged by a group bust algorithm so i do think its true that many of the people in the criminal Justice System are the most disadvantaged and the reality is they probably dont have a lot of say in their futures in their fates and how these algorithms are going to evaluate them. And whether this would happen if more powerful people are being judged by these algorithms i dont know now me personally i would rather be judged by a well designed algorithm a human in part because i believe the statistical. Methods for something risky in fact are better than humans in many situations and it can at least one as well designed eliminate a lot of these biases that that human Decision Makers often exhibit the United States has a massive Racial Discrimination problem and Public Services thats real so it is really understandable when agencies want to create tools that can help them keep an eye on frontline Decision Making in order to maybe identified discriminatory Decision Making and corrected the problem is that thats not actually the point at which discriminated discrimination is entering the system and this is one of my huge concerns about these kinds of systems is they tend to only understand discrimination as something bad. It is the result of an individual who is making ever actionable decisions. And they dont these systems are not as good at identifying bias that is systemic and structural the promise of algorithms is that we can mitigate the by sees that human Decision Makers always have you know we always were always responding to the way somebody looks who is we somebody acts and even if we try as hard as we can and if we really have these good intentions of the try to just focus on what matters i think is exceptionally difficult now that again is the promise of algorithms the reality is much more complicated the reality is that algorithms are trained on past human decisions theyre built by fallible humans them selves in so theres still this possibility that that by sees creep into the development and application of these algorithms but certainly the promise is that we can least make the situation better than it currently is one of the things im really concerned about about these systems is that they seem to be part of a philosophy that increasingly sees human Decision Making as black box and unknowable and computer Decision Making as transparent and accountable. And that to me is really frightening because of course computer Decision Making is not as objective and is not as unbiased as it seems at 1st glance we build bias into our technologies just like we build them into our right we teach our technologies to discriminate. But on the other hand peoples Decision Making is actually not that opaque we can ask people about why theyre making the decisions theyre making that can be part of their professional development and i think this idea that human Decision Making is somehow unknowable is a sort of ethical abandonment of the possibility to grow and to change that we really really need as a society to truly address the systemic roots of racism and classism and sexism in our society so it feels to me like were saying will never understand why people make discriminatory decisions so lets just let the computer make it and i think thats a mistake i think thats it a tragic mistake that will lead to a lot of suffering for a lot of people. So going back to the question that started us on this journey can we trust elders its. The biggest thing ive learned from speaking with usher the genius in many of us is that ive actually got to question. It isnt really so much about whether algorithms are trustworthy its more about the quality of the dot of the feet in egypt its those designing controlling. Human biases human imperfections thats what we see reflected in our algorithms and without better oversight we risk reinforcing our prejudices and social inequalities. That you often own. Or are programmed to a shame that the past is the future that they want as well and by the past thats often things the feel of stigma and bias and stereotypes and rejection and discrimination and really what we need is to create systems the allow for. A new future scenario is that and different from the all of course we can build better tools operant tools and i see them everywhere that i go but what makes a difference about good tools about just tools is building those tools with a broader set of values from the very beginning so not just efficiency not just cost savings but dignity and selfdetermination and justice and fairness and accountability and fairer process and all of those things that we really care about as a democracy have to be built in at the beginning from step one in every single tool. Were actually getting our hands on the data were analyzing the data. Now one thing that weve done is we try to make as much of the state of the old bulls possible so it encourage people to look out. This is one of our one of our projects is called the stanford open policing project we release lots of day dying to promote Justice System we release code for people to play with the data and i encourage everyone to look at that and try to understand whats going on and. You know maybe theyll discover a pattern that you can start solves my biggest piece of advice is to never underestimate your influence on. You know you might be finding some machine. Some Computer System that youve never been able to make lets say to his him inflicted huge hamas suffering but no words can make government scared your voices combined can make said. In court sit up and Pay Attention to gather we can shape the way these tools are created and the ways that they impact as a Political Community if we want Better Outcomes from these systems we have to we have to claim our space as Decision Making and Decision Makers at these tables. And we cant do that if we think that these technologies are somehow gods theyre built just just the way we build our kids we build these technologies and we have a right to be in dialogue with them. Think of some of the Biggest Companies in the world today all of the big tech with algorithms that they call the more that we use them the more data we produce were in the midst of a great race for data and Big Tech Companies are on a chase and tires are rising on a wealth of information and we need other commodities and the 2nd the far flung series oddly reexamined is where the corporations are colonizing the internet like the popularity and power of big tech on a just. One of americas worst coronavirus al grigson the prison happened in california after infected inmates were transferred from one facility to another nov into law. Windows are welded shut everyone is breathing the same air all of the time every day for a week straight then these alarms is called man down man down man down man down all day all my fault lines are 6 who is responsible. To make and present some clinton outbreak on a just as donald trump been good for America Everything is in disarray the media of course take every bit of bait that they can to demolish the fact that america has been a force for good in the world. From the American People get inspiration from him and the other half cringe you weekly take on us politics and society thats the bottom of. A mad no mood out of his parents house after he got to me he says he found more space to begin discussing after a run of eating it last year its now his home along with his wife to turn around and help but theres really government said that he was to be constructed to be tough to permit an issue that the militia ordered last month our interview with cut short as he hears that the israeli army has arrived in the village with the bulldozer residents say soldiers gave them one minute to get home it took the found me months to build their brick house and less than an hour to see it get demolished. The grisly attack in the friends that he had nice leaves 3 people dead president might call raises the National Security alert to its highest level. L. A. Why money inside this is al jazeera life are also coming up. For the lockdowns about to begin as rites of corona virus infection spread throughout europe. Only 5 days until the u. S. Election campaigning is in overdrive as both candidates try to
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