The elusiveness of ethics

Encoding fairness in an unfair world

About me

Debias AI Ehics Litmus Tests
debias.ai ethical-litmus.site

Slides

summerscope.github.io/slides/elusiveness-of-ethics-rts

Section 1

Desanctifying the charisma of numbers

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2018.1527710

Descriptive
-vs-
Normative

Girls wear pink

(Descriptive)

Girls wear pink

(Normative)

The way the world is?

or

The way the world should be?

For example...

We make normative assertions all the time

Think of the drone...

youtube.com/watch?v=uHGlCi9jOWY

Profit vs. Knowledge

-or-

Winning is not the same as understanding

Can a mousetrap be... unethical?

Building ML systems in a capitalist, corporate context:

There is no prediction; only intervention

Classification is never descriptive, always normative

So the moral is...

ML models are usually normative and interventionist when deployed within a capitalist framework

Section 2

Taxonomies of Bias

Drawn from this paper

A Framework for Understanding Unintended Consequences of Machine Learning

arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10002.pdf

Two primary types of harm

  1. Allocative harms
  2. Representational harms

A map to plot bias

Is this good training data?

✅ Historical Bias

✅ Historical Bias

Normative statement: a misalignment between the world as it is, and your values or objectives

✅ Historical Bias examples

✅ Mitigating Historical Bias

  • Can't manage what we can't measure
  • Test for model accuracy & allocation across sub-demographics
  • Encode 'positive bias' - think affirmative action, for models
  • Counterfactual fairness

Can we capture this data well?

✅ Measurement / Sampling Bias

✅ Representation Bias

✅ Measurement Bias

Problems with choosing, collection, or computing features and labels to use in a prediction problem

✅ Measurement Bias

  • Measurement process varies across groups
  • Quality of data varies across groups
  • Defined classification task is an oversimplification

✅ Measurement Bias examples

✅ Mitigating Measurement Bias

  • Review sampling methodologies
  • Assess proxy quality
  • Synthetic data

Can we form useful inferences from our data?

✅ Aggregation Bias

✅ Evaluation Bias

✅ Aggregation Bias

When a one-size-fit-all model is used for groups with different conditional distributions

✅ Aggregation Bias examples

✅ Mitigating Aggregation Bias

  • Consider salient differences in sub-demographics for your model
  • Add more detailed classifications
  • Identify for whom your model performs well

✅ Evaluation Bias

Occurs when the evaluation and/or benchark data for an algorithm doesn’t represent the target population

✅ Evaluation Bias examples

✅ Mitigating Evaluation Bias

  • More representative benchmark datasets
  • More granular benchmarks (sub-group evaluation)
  • Multiple confidence levels

Can we deploy those inferences effectively?

✅ Deployment Bias

✅ Deployment Bias

A mismatch between the problem a model is intended to solve and the way in which it is actually used.

✅ Deployment Bias examples

✅ Mitigating Deployment Bias

  • Involve designers, product managers, security people, and other product disciplines in application design
  • Conduct UX research on the use of your tool in the real world
  • Externalise model uncertainty
  • Design failure & recourse flows (first)

Further reading

A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning

arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09635.pdf

Shout out to Awful AI

github.com/daviddao/awful-ai

Mapping resources

Help me make it better!

github.com/summerscope/mapping-fair-ml

Section 3

Final observations

Bias is not one thing

Mitigation techniques require additional disciplines - social sciences & ethics

Bias is not one thing

  1. First identify
  2. Then measure
  3. Finally mitigate

Acknowledging failure

(is inevitable)

"I am an ethical person therefore I build ethical tech"
If you write a bug, it doesn't make you a bad programmer
If you make an ethical mistake, it doesn't make you an unethical person

Let's draw a line in the sand

Claiming moral authority


 
 

Claiming moral imperative

Acknowledging complexity

Thank you!

summerscope.github.io/slides/elusiveness-of-ethics-rts

Questions?

@summerscope