The Ethical Algorithm Quotes

“The algorithm was simply trying to act as a mediator of sorts, attempting to satisfy each user’s dating preferences in light of those of other users. We might even say that the algorithm was doing the most obvious and natural thing with the data it was given, and that the real problem was the data—the preferences themselves.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“But in algorithmic violations of fairness and privacy, it seemed reasonable to view the algorithm as the “perpetrator” and people as the “victims,” at”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“Machine learning already has a “goal,” which is to maximize predictive accuracy.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“The insights we can get from this unprecedented access to data can be a great thing: we can get new understanding about how our society works, and improve public health, municipal services, and consumer products. But as individuals, we aren’t just the recipients of the fruits of this data analysis: we are the data, and it is being used to make decisions about us—sometimes very consequential decisions.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT, was quoted in The Economist as saying that “according to some estimates, three-quarters of published scientific papers in the field of machine learning are bunk.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“Society’s most influential algorithms—from Google search and Facebook’s News Feed to credit scoring and health risk assessment algorithms—are generally developed by highly trained scientists and engineers who are carefully applying well-understood design principles. The problems actually lie within those very principles, most specifically those of machine learning. It will serve us well later to discuss those principles a bit now.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“As we saw, machine learning algorithms optimizing solely for predictive accuracy may discriminate against racial or gender groups, while algorithms computing aggregate statistics or models from behavioral or medical data may leak compromising information about specific individuals.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“Think about it as an algorithm that can flip coins as part of its precisely specified process and then make decisions that depend on the outcome of the coin flips. So a randomized algorithm maps inputs to the probabilities of different outputs. (We’ll see a concrete example of a simple randomized algorithm in the next section.)”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“A randomized algorithm is just an algorithm that is allowed to use randomization.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“News Feed algorithm uses our feedback to build models of the content we want to see, which in turn influences the articles and posts we read and “like,” which again changes the model.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“The good news is that the trade-offs between accuracy and good behavior can also be quantified, allowing stakeholders to make informed decisions.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“How do we introduce new goals such as fairness and privacy into the code without “confusing” the algorithm? The short answer is that we view these new goals as constraints on the learning process. Instead of asking for the model that only minimizes error, as we ask for the model that minimizes error subject to the constraint that it not violate particular notions of fairness or privacy “too much.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“Of course, one of the greatest challenges here is in the development of quantitative definitions of social values that many of us can agree on.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“To make informed decisions, we need to be able to understand the consequences of deploying certain kinds of algorithms, and the costs associated with constraining them in various ways. And that is what this book is about.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“The result is that the complicated, automated decision-making that can arise from machine learning has a character of its own, distinct from that of its designer. The designer may have had a good understanding of the algorithm that was used to find the decision-making model, but not of the model itself. To make sure that the effects of these models respect the societal norms that we want to maintain, we need to learn how to design these goals directly into our algorithms.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“But the models they produce—the outputs of such algorithms—can be complicated and inscrutable, especially when the input data is itself complex and the space of possible models is immense. And this is why the human being deploying the model won’t fully understand”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“The real reasons for algorithmic misbehavior are perhaps even more disturbing than human incompetence or malfeasance (which we are at least more familiar with and have some mechanisms for addressing). Society’s”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“They are different both because we allow them a significant amount of agency to make decisions without human intervention and because they are often so complex and opaque that even their designers cannot anticipate how they will behave in many situations.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“An algorithm, after all, is just a human artifact, like a hammer, and who would entertain the idea of an ethical hammer?”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“This means that each step of the process you describe must be unambiguous”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“But we must also think seriously about addressing the concerns scientifically—about what it might mean to encode ethical principles directly into the design of the algorithms that are increasingly woven into our daily lives. This book is about the emerging science of ethical algorithm design, which tries to do exactly that.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“Because algorithms—those little bits of machine code that increasingly mediate our behavior via our phones and the Internet—aren’t simply analyzing the data that we generate with our every move. They are also being used to actively make decisions that affect our lives.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“With tongue only slightly in cheek, we can view the typical practitioner as following Nike’s “Just Do It” mantra, while the theorist follows the “Just Define and Study It” mantra.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

“It is an instance of what are known as convex minimization problems, which can be solved by so-called gradient descent methods; this is just algorithm-speak for “walk downhill in the steepest direction to quickly get to the lowest point in the valley.”
― Michael Kearns, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design