The police accepted the software’s judgment and Ms. Hemid went home with no further protection.
This is what happens when you rely on your Nintendos, instead of using your damn brains.
Even when given the best and most sophisticated tools and equipment available, police will manage to fuck things up at every opportunity because they’re utterly incompetent.
And that’s why I’m against ALL such things.
Not because they can’t be done right and you can’t teach people to use them.
But because there’s a slippery slope of human nature where people want to offload the burden of decision to a machine, an oracle, a die, a set of bird intestines. The genie is out and they will do that again and again, but in a professional organization, like police, one can make a decision of creating fewer opportunities for such catastrophes.
The rule is that people shouldn’t use machines above their brains, as one other commenter says, and they should only use this in a logical OR with their own judgment made earlier, as another commenter says, but the problem is in human nature and I’d rather not introduce this particular point of failure to police, politics, anything juridical and military.
And that’s why I’m against ALL such things.
Absolutely, ACAB
Cops are still necessary. It’s giving humans a machine to blame any failure upon is a very bad thing.
I personally think these "AI"s are supported by governments. There’s been a lot of talk 10-15 years ago how many government official’s functions can be replaced by AI (without quotes), since these functions do not require agenda and are not even too fuzzy, but require semantic understanding. So "AI"s (with quotes) are being used like a vaccine, so that the wide mass of humans would hate the guts of the very idea, having experienced them (EDIT: and wouldn’t want actual semantic reasoning systems). Why - because people working in governments love power and hate transparency, they also hate the idea of being replaced with machines.
Or maybe it’s a conspiracy theory and they all really believe in accelerationism.
some political groups engage in mismanagement on purpose to make people dislike the government, that’s hardly a conspiracy, but it’s a little weird to think they’re propping up the misuse of LLMs rather than that being a natural consequence of stupid capitalism
What is that?
It’s from movie Idiocracy from hospital scene. Initial diagnosis.
Here’s this part of the scene: https://youtu.be/LXzJR7K0wK0
It’s 2505 and the average man from 2005 is now by far the smartest man in the world.
It’s a Doctor’s diagnostic desk from the film, “Idiocracy”
But the system seems to be better than police officers. Which is entirely believable. Humans have all kinds of biases that make the decisions we make far less than desirable.
Per the article, it has decreased the risk of repeated violence and, according to an expert, its the best systen we have. Why would you want to go back to a worse system? This is using our brains in an attempt to overcoming our biases.
I really have a hard time deciding if that is the scandal the article makes it out to be (although there is some backpedaling going on). The crucial point is: 8% of the decisions turn out to be wrong or misjudged. The article seems to want us to think that the use of the algorithm is to blame. Yet, is it? Is there evidence that a human would have judged those cases differently? Is there evidence that the algorithm does a worse job than humans? If not, then the article devolves onto blatant fear mongering and the message turns from “algorithm is to blame for deaths” into “algorithm unable to predict the future in 100% of cases”, which of course it can’t…
Is there evidence that a human would have judged those cases differently?
It implies that a human would have been worse. Or at least that an average human would be worse, the ones making the decision.
Critical thinking spotted, proper authorities have been notified.
We will fix you!
Could a human have judged it better? Maybe not. I think a better question to ask is, “Should anyone be sent back into a violent domestic situation with no additional protection, no matter the calculated risk?” And as someone who has been on the receiving end of that conversation and later narrowly escaped a total-family-annihilation situation, I would say no…no one should be told that, even though they were in a terrifying, life-threatening situation, they will not be provided protection, and no further steps will be taken to keep them from being injured again, or from being killed next time. But even without algorithms, that happens constantly…the only thing the algorithm accomplishes is that the investigator / social worker / etc doesn’t have to have any kind of personal connection with the victim, so they don’t have to feel some kind of way for giving an innocent person a death sentence because they were just doing what the computer told them to.
Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.
the only thing the algorithm accomplishes is that the investigator / social worker / etc doesn’t have to have any kind of personal connection with the victim
This even works for people pulling the trigger. Following orders, sed lex dura lex, et cetera ad infinitum.
Yep! For all the psych nerds, it’s pretty much a direct lift of the Milgram Shock Experiment
Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.
Louder for anyone in the back in the US thinking it doesn’t sound so bad when Republicans like Josh Hawley and JD Vance call for an end to no-fault divorces.
That’s right, one of our VP candidates wants to disallow people from divorcing their abusive partners without jumping through hoops that will take months if not years, and leaves them susceptible to their abusive partner, now even angrier than before that the victim would dare try to leave.
Yep. The ones who manage to slip notes to their veterinarian to help them get away are the exception.
Reading stuff like this makes me sick. All is not well with the world.
It reminds me of the debate around self driving cars. Tesla has a flawed implementation of self driving tech, that’s trying to gather all the information it needs through camera inputs vs using multiple sensor types. This doesn’t always work, and has led to some questionable crashes where it definitely looks like a human driver could have avoided the crash.
However, even with Tesla’s flawed self driving, They’re supposed to have far fewer wrecks than humans driving. According to Tesla’s safety report, Tesla’s in self driving mode average 5-6 million miles per accident vs 1-1.5 million miles for Tesla drivers not using self driving (US average is 500-750k miles per accident).
So a system like this doesn’t have to be perfect to do a far better job than people can, but that doesn’t mean it won’t feel terrible for the unlucky people who things go poorly for.
Unfortunately, this is bad statistics.
The Teslas in self driving mode tend to be used on main roads, and most accidents per mile happen on the small side streets. People are also much safer where Teslas are driven than the these statistics suggest.
There’s not much concrete data I can find on accident rates on highways vs non-highways. You would expect small side streets accidents to have lower fatality rates though, with wrecks at highway speeds to have much higher fatality rates. From what I see, a government investigation into how safe autopilot is determined there were 13 deaths, which is very low number given the billions of miles driven with autopilot on (3 billion+ in 2020, probably 5-10billion now? Just guessing here since I can’t find a newer number).
But yeah, there are so many factors with driving that it’s hard get an exact idea. Rural roads have the highest fatality rates (making up to 90% of accident fatalities in some states), and it’s not hard to image that Tesla’s are less popular in rural communities (although they seem to be pretty popular where I live).
But also rural roads are a perfect use case for autopilot, generally easy driving conditions where most deaths happen due to speeding and the driver not paying attention. Increased adoption of self driving cars in rural communities would probably save a lot of lives.
That report fails to take into account that the Cybertruck is already a wreck when it rolls off the assembly line.
Wow Tesla said that Tesla was safe!?!? This changes everything.
The article is not about how the AI is responsible for the death. It’s likely that the woman would have died in the counterfactual.
The question is not “how effective is AI”? The question is should life or death decisions be made by an electrified Oracle at Delphi. You must answer this question before “is AI effective” becomes relevant.
If somebody was adjudicating traffic court with Tarot cards, would you ask: well how accurate are the cards compared to a judge?
Your point is valid regardless but the article mentions nothing about AI. (“Algorithm” doesn’t mean “AI”.)
Decisions should be made by whomever or whatever is most effective. That’s not even a debate. If the tarot cards were right more often than the judge, fire the judge and get me a deck. Because the judge is clearly ineffective.
You can’t privilege an approach just because it sounds more reasonable. It also has to BE more reasonable. It’s crazy to say “I’m happy being wrong because I’m more comfortable with the process”
The trick of course is to find fair ways to measure effectiveness accurately and make sure it’s repeatable. That’s a rabbit hole of challenges.
My impression from the article is more that they’re not doing any kind of garbage-in assessment: nobody is making sure they’re getting answers about the right person (eg: some women date more than one guy) and some women don’t feel safe giving accurate answers to the police, and there aren’t good failsafes available for when it’s wrong; you’re forced to hire legal counsel and pursue a change via the courts.
That and, their action for low-risk is all wrong. The stakes are too high to not give someone help, regardless of the risk level.
I also wonder if the algorithm is being used to override the victim.
Like if she asked for help, if she didn’t want to go home and wanted to go to a shelter and get a restraining order. But they said, “low risk, nope, no resources for you”. Depending on her situation, home to her abuser may have been her only option then. In which case, this is a level of horror the article didn’t cover. The article really doesn’t explain how the risk level output by the algorithm is used. I’m having a difficult time with this article too.
The article mentions that one woman (Stefany González Escarraman) went for a restraining order the day after the system deemed her at “low risk” and the judge denied it referring to the VioGen score.
One was Stefany González Escarraman, a 26-year-old living near Seville. In 2016, she went to the police after her husband punched her in the face and choked her. He threw objects at her, including a kitchen ladle that hit their 3-year-old child. After police interviewed Ms. Escarraman for about five hours, VioGén determined she had a negligible risk of being abused again.
The next day, Ms. Escarraman, who had a swollen black eye, went to court for a restraining order against her husband. Judges can serve as a check on the VioGén system, with the ability to intervene in cases and provide protective measures. In Ms. Escarraman’s case, the judge denied a restraining order, citing VioGén’s risk score and her husband’s lack of criminal history.
About a month later, Ms. Escarraman was stabbed by her husband multiple times in the heart in front of their children.
It also says:
Spanish police are trained to overrule VioGén’s recommendations depending on the evidence, but accept the risk scores about 95 percent of the time, officials said. Judges can also use the results when considering requests for restraining orders and other protective measures.
You could argue that the problem isn’t so much the algorithm itself as it is the level of reliance upon it. The algorithm isn’t unproblematic though. The fact that it just spits out a simple score: “negligible”, “low”, “medium”, “high”, “extreme” is, IMO, an indicator that someone’s trying to conflate far too many factors into a single dimension. I have a really hard time believing that anyone knowledgeable in criminal psychology and/or domestic abuse would agree that 35 yes or no questions would be anywhere near sufficient to evaluate the risk of repeated abuse. (I know nothing about domestic abuse or criminal psychology, so I could be completely wrong.)
Apart from that, I also find this highly problematic:
[The] victims interviewed by The Times rarely knew about the role the algorithm played in their cases. The government also has not released comprehensive data about the system’s effectiveness and has refused to make the algorithm available for outside audit.
i could say a lot in response to your comment about the benefits and shortcomings of algorithms (or put another way, screening tools or assessments), but i’m tired.
i will just point out this, for anyone reading.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2573025/
i am exceedingly troubled that something which is commonly regarded as indicating very high risk when working with victims of domestic violence was ignored in the cited case (disclaimer - i haven’t read the article). if the algorithm fails to consider history of strangulation, it’s garbage. if the user of the algorithm did not include that information (and it was disclosed to them), or keyed it incorrectly, they made an egregious error or omission.
i suppose, without getting into it, i would add - 35 questions (ie established statistical risk factors) is a good amount. large categories are fine. no screening tool is totally accurate, because we can’t predict the future or have total and complete understanding of complex situations. tools are only useful to people trained to use them and with accurate data and inputs. screening tools and algorithms must find a balance between accurate capture and avoiding false positives.
The article mentions that one woman (Stefany González Escarraman) went for a restraining order the day after the system deemed her at “low risk” and the judge denied it referring to the VioGen score.
The judge should be in jail for that and If the judge thinks the “system” can do his job then he should quit as he is clearly useless.
From those quotes looks like Idiocracy.
An algorithm is never to blame, some pencil necked desk jockey decided the criteria to get help that was used to create the algorithm, the blame is entirely on them.
That said, I doubt it would make any difference if a human was in the loop. An algorithm is still al algorithm, even if it’s applied by a human. We usually just call that a “policy” though. People have been murdered by the paper sea for decades before we started calling it “algorithms”.
Thank you, this is why I came to the Fediverse from Reddit.
IMO this place is far more an echo chamber than Reddit. Both places have their share of team based opinions but reddits diversity IMO is better at surfacing it.
Here’s another quote further down:
Since 2007, about 0.03 percent of Spain’s 814,000 reported victims of gender violence have been killed after being assessed by VioGén, the ministry said. During that time, repeat attacks have fallen to roughly 15 percent of all gender violence cases from 40 percent, according to government figures.
“If it weren’t for this, we would have more homicides and gender-based violence,” said Juan José López Ossorio, a psychologist who helped create VioGén and works for the Interior Ministry.
So no, not a scandal, it seems it is helping, but perhaps could be better. At least that’s my read.
The crucial point is: 8% of the decisions turn out to be wrong or misjudged.
The article says:
Yet roughly 8 percent of women who the algorithm found to be at negligible risk and 14 percent at low risk have reported being harmed again, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the system.
Granted, neither “negligible” or “low risk” means “no risk”, but I think 8% and 14% are far too high numbers for those categories.
Furthermore, there’s this crucial bit:
At least 247 women have also been killed by their current or former partner since 2007 after being assessed by VioGén, according to government figures. While that is a tiny fraction of gender violence cases, it points to the algorithm’s flaws. The New York Times found that in a judicial review of 98 of those homicides, 55 of the slain women were scored by VioGén as negligible or low risk for repeat abuse.
So in the 98 murders they reviewed, the algorithm put more than 50% of them at negligible or low risk for repeat abuse. That’s a fucking coin flip!
You’ll get that result without an algorithm as well unfortunately. A domestic violence interview often doesn’t result in you getting the truth of what happens because the victim is often economically and emotionally dependent on their partner. It’s helpful to have an algorithm that makes you ask the right questions but there’s still no way I know of to get the right answers of those questions from a victim 100 percent of the time.
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.
It’s helpful to have an algorithm that makes you ask the right questions […]
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.
Minority Report: the beta test
Our pigs don’t look as good as [generic Hollywood actor]
Computers are only at fault when its convenient to blame them.
I remember years ago when they said the value of our lives would be determined by a panel of people.
Now its by a machine.
Oh, it’s far worse than that… the value of our lives have been determined by the (so-called) “free market” for a very long time now.
The machine is simply going to streamline the process.
The computer response should be treated as just an indication and in all cases a human needs to decide to override that
Otherwise we’ll all become useless pieces of a simulation
I went to the bank to ask a loan and then it got rejected because the computer said I didn’t met the parameters by just 40 euro. Ah ok, I told the clerk, just lower the amount that I’m asking or spread it over a longer period. No, because after the quote is done and I signed the authorization for the algorithm to perform credit score, it can’t do it again in 3 months. What?? Call a supervisor and let them override it, 40 euro is so minimal that it’s not that big issue. No, impossible. So that means each single employee in the bank is just an interface to the computer and can be fired at will?
Can we stop having AI do… anything?
Algorithms aren’t AI. They’re standardization measures in cases like this. Hell you don’t even need computers for many of them. We use tons in healthcare to classify risk, decide on treatment options, and even decide on how much medication to give.
Despite this article, I’m still not convinced that the algorithms aren’t better. The policy states that people need to use their best judgement and can override the algorithms. The article argues that the algorithms are being over relied on. The article mentions in passing, however, that the statistics were worse before the algorithm was introduced.
The point of the matter is, best judgement can be shitty. Your average cop has no idea what questions to ask without a list and how important they are per research. Some suggestions are too continue using the tool but use things like psychologists to administer it. The only way you could reasonably have a psych on call for every police station is to make it a remote interview, which frankly doesn’t seem better to me.
In the end, the unstated problem is resources and how best to utilize them to prevent the violence. I’m sure Spain’s policy could be improved but shoring it up with an algorithm is a good practice.
It looks like the minority report future didn’t consider poor coding or AI “hallucinations”
In the late 1970s (I was a kid) the computer is always right was a common sarcastic parody of all the people who actually believed it.
We’d discoverin the 1980s it was possible to have missing data, insufficient data or erroneous data.
It’s a sentiment at least as old as the first things that we now call computers.
On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
—Charles Babbage
As if humans can magically make correct decisions with incorrect information lmao. So true.
The algorithm:
isSafe = random();
if isSafe >.5 println (“everything is fine\n”);
per the article, it’s rather better than that.
I admit to having grossly oversimplified things. Sorry.
I thought that would have been obvious to everyone already.
Pedantic Mathematician here.
If it failed, then it was a heuristic, rather than an algorithm.
Clearly, that’s the most important thing about this post.
You’re welcome.
Why not both? A bad algorithm based on bad heuristics? There are many many algorithms that fail at what they’re supposed to do.
As a non-condescending “mathematician”, I’m happy to help.
Pretty much anything trying to predict human behavior is a heuristic; people using them as if they’ve got some kind of certainty is a problem.
Yes, exactly.
Why do we live in a dystopian hellscape
People are complicated creatures that can’t be easily fit into niche categories despite our brains need to do so.
Culture.
Capitalism.
Minority Don’t Report
Cracked me up thanks!
About 20 new cases of gender violence arrive every day, each requiring investigation. Providing police protection for every victim would be impossible given staff sizes and budgets.
I think machine-learning is not the key part, the quote above is. All these 20 people a day come to the police for protection, a very small minority of them might be just paranoid, but I’m sure that most of them had some bad shit done to them by their partner already and (in an ideal world) would all deserve some protection. The algorithm’s “success” in defined in the article as reducing probability of repeat attacks, especially the ones eventually leading to death.
The police are trying to focus on the ones who are deemed to be the most at risk. A well-trained algorithm can help reduce the risk vs the judgement of the possibly overworked or inexperienced human handling the complaint? I’ll take that. But people are going to die anyway. Just, hopefully, a bit less of them and I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s the machine’s fault when they do.
Sounds like a triage situation. That really sucks for the women affected.
Is it really too much to want enough resources to respond appropriately to all cases?
