can you explain why doing it with a computer might make it more valid? are you already highly confident that you have good heuristics to automate and scale? if so, what's your evidence? if the heuristics used by the software are proprietary, how do you judge whether they line up with your values without essentially running an experiment on society? doesn't that seem a little cruel if the software is an integral part of a process that violates citizens' constitutional rights?
a palantir employee does a great job of explaining why their technology is frightening, as part of pushing back on someone from NO who wanted predictions with numerical rankings for potential offenders/victims:
> “The looming concern is that an opaque scoring algorithm substitutes the veneer of quantitative certainty for more holistic, qualitative judgement and human culpability,” Bowman wrote. “One of the lasting virtues of the SNA work we’ve done to date is that we’ve kept human analysts in the loop to ensure that networks are being explored and analyzed in a way that passes the straight-face test.”
can you explain why doing it with a computer might make it more valid? are you already highly confident that you have good heuristics to automate and scale? if so, what's your evidence? if the heuristics used by the software are proprietary, how do you judge whether they line up with your values without essentially running an experiment on society? doesn't that seem a little cruel if the software is an integral part of a process that violates citizens' constitutional rights?