"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."
"One great way to tell the difference is to ask AI recruiting companies what they use artificial intelligence, machine learning and/or deep learning for. Hopefully the hiring firm can what it's using the new technology for and not just that it is. If not it's time to dig a bit deeper."
"Depending on how legal decisions shake out, AI systems could become a valuable tool to assist creativity, a nuisance ripping off hard-working human musicians, or both."
"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased.
"We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""
"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!"
Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."