478
An Algorithm Told Police She Was Safe. Then Her Husband Killed Her.
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
478 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
58100 readers
4900 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Odd. I replied to this comment, but now my reply is gone. Gonna try again and type up as much as I can remember.
Regardless, an algorithm expecting binary answers will obviously not take para- and extralinguistic cues into account. That extra 50 ms hesitation, the downwards glance and the voice cracking when answering "no" to "has he ever tried to strangle you before?" has a reasonable chance to get picked up by a human, but when reducing it to something that the algorithm can handle, it's just a simple "no". Humans are really good at picking up on such cues, even if they aren't consciously aware that they're doing it, but if said humans are preoccupied with staring into a computer screen in order to input the answers to the questionnaire, then there's a much higher chance that they'll miss them too. I honestly only see negatives here.
Arguably a piece of paper could solve that problem.
Seriously. 55 victims out of the 98 homicide cases sampled were deemed at negligible or low risk. If a non-algorithm-assisted department presented those numbered I'd expect them to be looking for new jobs real fast.
I think beyond that it's purely the failure of the interviewer and not the tool. I think getting rid of the tool will just leave you with shitty interviewers and back to the same situation as you had before.
I've given plenty of algorithmic driven assessments myself, though mine are generally much shorter and the weights on the questions much simpler (plus I know the actual reasons behind the weight of my questions and why I'm asking them). You can always intervene when someone's lying and redirect them and can override the algorithm just like this Spanish policy. Lazy judges and police will exist without the tool.
It might be helpful for the tool to include a label that the interviewer thinks the result is unreliable due to the evasiveness of the interviewee, if only to show where the problems are coming from.