Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe

amarashar's bookmarks 2018-09-21

Summary:

The MIT algorithm had done all the city could reasonably ask. It had sorted through more possibilities than any human being could possibly contemplate. And it had come up with a solution no bureaucrat had ever mustered. But it was people who made the final call. People with competing interests and a mish-mash of motivations. This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn’t solve it. If anything, the algorithm fueled the conflict and made the choices stark. Before the district commissioned the formula, few parents had thought about the interplay between high school start times and teenage sleep deprivation. And even fewer understood that starting high school later would mean sending younger kids to school earlier. But even if the algorithm flopped, says Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor who now runs Data-Smart City Solutions at Harvard, it was worth pursuing. “We live in an inherently political world,” he says, “and sometimes, politics are going to trump science. But if the science can illuminate the disparities, that’s better than continuing in ignorance.”

Link:

https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

From feeds:

Ethics/Gov of AI » amarashar's bookmarks
Berkman Klein » djones's bookmarks

Tags:

Date tagged:

09/21/2018, 12:18

Date published:

09/21/2018, 11:29