Data Ethics Club meeting 03-03-21, 1-2pm GMT#

Meeting info#

Description#

You’re welcome to join us for our next Data Ethics Club meeting on 3rd March at 1-2pm GMT. You don’t need to register, just pop in.

This time we’re going to read Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach by Abeba Birhane, which calls for a system-wide acceptance of critical thought about context and implications as an essential component of AI ethics, fairness, and justice.

Thank you to @robertarbon for suggesting this week’s content, and to @ninadicara, who’ll be leading this week’s meeting.

Discussion points#

There will be time to talk about whatever we like, relating to the paper, but here are some specific questions to think about while you’re reading.

  • What did you think about Birhane’s description of relationality and how data science fits with it?

  • Birhane says that ““fixing” bias [makes] the assumption that there exists a single correct description of reality where a deviation from it has resulted in bias”. What are your thoughts on this?

  • In one of the final points in the paper invites us to move away from only using machine learning to find patterns and instead examine the patterns we find and ask why we are finding them. Do you think this applies equally across applications of ML?

Meeting notes#

Who came#

Number of people: 21

What did we think?#

100% (20 people) said this content sparked interesting discussion 100% (20 people) said they’d recommend this content to others

Nina’s Twitter thread