Error-Prone Algorithms: The Dangers When AI Gets It Wrong

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly relied upon to make important decisions that impact our lives. From facial recognition to financial lending algorithms, AI is automating processes that were previously handled by humans. However, what happens when these complex algorithms get it wrong? As AI plays a growing role across industries, understanding the risks of error-prone algorithms is crucial.

Introduction to Error-Prone Algorithms

An algorithm is a set of instructions or rules that a computer follows to accomplish a task. Machine learning algorithms “learn” by being trained on large datasets. The algorithm analyzes the data to find patterns and make predictions or decisions without explicit programming.

While AI promises enhanced efficiency and accuracy, algorithms can also replicate human bias, discriminate, and make serious mistakes with dire consequences. Just like humans, algorithms are fallible. But their errors can be harder to detect and are often deployed at massive scale.

Some key ways algorithms can demonstrate error-prone behavior include:

• Poor quality training data: If the dataset used to train the algorithm contains biases, errors, or lacks diversity, this gets reflected in the algorithm’s decisions. Insufficient relevant training data also leads to mistakes.
• Overfitting: When an algorithm is overtrained on the same data, it fails to generalize to new data and makes unreliable predictions.
• Underfitting: An underfit model cannot capture the underlying trend in a dataset and thus performs poorly even with training data.
• Non-representative data: Models trained on data that is not representative of real-world diversity and conditions have limited practical applicability.
• Unanticipated outcomes: Algorithms can make unexpected errors when faced with uncommon edge cases or adversarial attacks. Their black-box nature makes it hard to anticipate their behavior.
• Feedback loops: When algorithms are used to make decisions that influence the training data for future iterations, it can amplify biases.

The consequences of such algorithmic failures can range from frustrating to downright dangerous. Understanding what can go wrong is the first step toward developing ethical, robust AI.

Real-World Cases of Algorithmic Errors

To appreciate the real-world impacts of faulty algorithms, let’s examine some well-known examples spanning crucial sectors.

Criminal Justice

Algorithms are increasingly used in the criminal justice system to predict the risk of recidivism and determine bail, sentencing and parole decisions. However, these models have exhibited significant racial biases and made erroneous predictions that adversely impacted people’s lives:

• COMPAS: This proprietary recidivism prediction tool was found to have nearly twice the false-positive rate for black defendants compared to white defendants. It incorrectly flagged black defendants as high-risk at almost twice the rate as white defendants.
• PredPol: Widely used to predict crime hotspots and guide police patrols, PredPol has been criticized for perpetuating systemic racial bias by over-policing minority neighborhoods.
• Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS): Northpointe’s COMPAS algorithm for parole decisions was found to have only 20% accuracy in predicting recidivism. It also gave longer sentences to black defendants versus white defendants who posed an equal risk.

Such errors can deprive defendants of due process and entrench discriminatory policing practices. While removing the opaque algorithms is one solution, finding ways to improve transparency, evaluate fairness, and incorporate context is vital.

Healthcare

In healthcare, algorithmic tools are being designed for everything from diagnosing diseases to optimizing hospital operations. But real-world testing has revealed potentially dangerous flaws:

• Pulse oximeter: These devices use AI algorithms to measure blood oxygen levels. However, they have exhibited racial bias, with error rates nearly three times higher for Black patients compared to white patients, which could lead to missed hypoxemia diagnoses.
• Computed tomography (CT): AI-guided CT interpretation algorithms had significantly higher error rates and misdiagnoses for female patients compared to males across multiple studies.
• Patient deterioration prediction: Machine learning models to predict patient deterioration showed 66-95% false alarm rates in hospitals, causing alarm fatigue in nurses.

Such critical medical errors can be life-threatening. While AI has enormous potential in healthcare, avoiding one-size-fits-all models and extensive real-world testing is essential to patient safety.

Facial Recognition

Facial recognition is one of the most ubiquitous and controversial AI technologies. However, algorithms continue to show shockingly high error rates, especially for women and people of color:

• Affectiva: This AI emotion detection tool was found to have error rates of up to 37% for people of color, especially Black men, falsely detecting anger.
• Amazon Rekognition: Amazon’s face recognition tool had 35% more accuracy issues detecting women’s versus men’s faces, as well as higher failure rates for women of color.
• NEC Face Recognition System: In multiple tests, NEC’s technology had error rates of up to 40% higher for East-Asian versus white faces.
• Face ID: Apple’s Face ID regularly fails to distinguish between East-Asian people, prompting lawsuits.

Such high error rates lead to harmful outcomes like wrongful arrests, deportations, and profile-based surveillance. Facial recognition algorithms require oversight and drastic improvements in representation before being considered for widespread use.

Financial Services

AI is being integrated across the financial sector for everything from credit-decision algorithms to fraud detection and financial advising. However, these models have also exhibited bias against minorities and lower-income groups:

• Apple Card: Launched in 2019, Apple’s credit card offering used an algorithm that assigned credit limits up to 20 times higher to men versus women with similar financial profiles. They had to tweak the biased algorithm.
• UK visa system: The automated visa application system was found to have a 10% higher refusal rate for applicants from Africa versus Europe, likely due to algorithmic discrimination.
• Predictive policing: Inner city and minority neighborhoods are more likely to be flagged for insurance fraud prediction using big data analytics compared to affluent suburbs. But higher premiums due to adoption of flawed algorithms can exacerbate economic inequality.

Such unfair outcomes prevent equal access to loans, insurance, markets, and exacerbate poverty. Algorithms require sufficient oversight and guardrails to avoid penalizing protected groups.

This small sampling of cases provides a glimpse into the real-world costs of AI failures across critical domains. It highlights the need for improved training data, rigorous testing, transparency, and human oversight before blindly handing over decisions to black box algorithms.

Key Factors That Make Algorithms Error-Prone

Algorithms do not operate in a vacuum. Their design, the data used to train them, and real-world pressures all contribute to flawed systems with unintended consequences. Here are some key factors that raise the risk of errors:

Poor Quality Training Data

“Garbage in, garbage out” applies perfectly to AI systems. Without clean, accurate, and representative training data, algorithms will simply encode biases and mistakes into their logic:

• Insufficient training data volume leads to unpredictable outputs with new data.
• Homogenous data causes algorithms to learn biases and have trouble generalizing.
• Errors and outliers in data get reflected in the algorithm’s logic.
• Unbalanced class distribution prevents detecting important signals.
• Irrelevant, redundant, or correlated data fields add noise to models.

Robust processes for data collection, cleaning, processing, and labeling are critical. Having humans-in-the-loop helps catch edge cases that automated pipelines might miss. Prioritizing quality over quantity reduces faulty assumptions.

Complexity vs Interpretability Tradeoff

More complex algorithms like deep neural networks with billions of parameters can model intricate patterns but become inscrutable black boxes:

• Their inner logic defies explanation, known as the “interpretability problem.”
• It becomes nearly impossible to diagnose failures, biases, or hacking attempts.
• They fail in unpredictable and unforeseeable ways when put into practice.
• High complexity without guardrails leads to overconfident and potentially unethical systems.

Simpler, interpretable models like decision trees, while limited in capability, lend themselves to analysis and oversight. Striking the right balance is key.

Poor Generalization

When algorithms overfit to idiosyncrasies in training data, they fail to generalize to real-world scenarios:

• Susceptibility to adversarial examples that generate high-confidence but false predictions.
• Inability to handle domain shift such as new visual backgrounds or linguistic styles.
• Degraded performance when ported across demographics, languages, and geographies.

Regularization, standardized data cleansing, and techniques like ensemble learning improve out-of-sample generalization. But models still struggle with unfamiliar contexts.

Lack of Fail-safes

Unlike autonomous systems like aircraft that are designed with redundancy and fail-safes in mind, many commercial algorithms lack safeguards against failures:

• Absence of circuit breakers, rollback protocols, or human override options.
• Failure to account for uncertainty and abstain from high-risk predictions.
• Results delivered without caveats on confidence levels.
• No protocols for graceful degradation if a subsystem fails.

Building reliable ML requires anticipating edge cases and instituting guardrails to minimize harm, akin to engineering disciplines.

Insufficient Testing

Releasing algorithms without rigorous real-world testing across diverse scenarios leads to undetected flaws:

• Narrow focus on performance metrics like accuracy over fitness and safety.
• Limited testing with small homogeneous batches of data.
• Failure to simulate model behavior under stress across edge cases.
• Not establishing human-centered development workflows.

Extensive requirements analysis, safety testing, simulations, adversarial techniques, and participatory design helps enhance algorithmic accountability.

Lack of Transparency

Proprietary black-box algorithms defy examination and resist calls for transparency:

• Closed development precludes external audits for ethics and logic.
• Obscure data flows and transformations.
• Corporations wary of exposing trade secrets in algorithms.
• Difficult to diagnose flaws or measure improvement.

Transparent design, explainable AI techniques, audits, and open standards are crucial for earning public trust and providing oversight.

By considering these factors that contribute to algorithmic errors, developers can make more concerted efforts to enhance robustness, evaluate risks, and institute guardrails against failures. But technical solutions are insufficient without accountability.

Dangers and Downstream Impacts of Algorithmic Errors

As algorithms become deeply integrated into high-stakes decisions, the harms stemming from their malfunctions also multiply. Here are some of the ripple effects:

Loss of Public Trust

High-profile blunders like Microsoft’s racist Tay chatbot or Tesla’s fatal self-driving crashes erode public faith in AI. When algorithms fail visibly, it becomes harder to implement AI solutions without facing skepticism.

Financial Costs

Faulty algorithms lead to losses like:

• Product returns and repairs.
• Opportunity cost from suboptimal decisions.
• Litigation and settlement costs in case of harm.
• Security breaches and data losses.

A survey by FICO estimated US financial impact of poor AI quality to be $1.4 trillion in 2030.

Reinforcing Biases

Algorithms that encode human prejudices or make errors that disproportionately affect minority groups end up perpetuating historical inequities. This leads to a denial of opportunities.

Physical Harm

When algorithms malfunction in cyber-physical systems like self-driving cars or medical devices, catastrophic harm including loss of life can result. While rare, such incidents create lasting mistrust.

Erosion of Privacy Rights

The opacity of algorithms combined with their pervasiveness in surveillance systems amplify privacy violations through dragnet tracking and targeting.

Increased Regulation

To address algorithmic harms, lawmakers are imposing strict mandates like the EU’s GDPR requirements around “right to explanation” for automated decisions that impact users’ lives. While well-intentioned, this risks stifling innovation.

Unfair Outcomes

Discriminatory algorithms in areas like hiring, banking, and policing can arbitrarily restrict opportunities for entire demographic groups. Identifying and rectifying algorithmic bias remains challenging.

The farther-reaching societal impacts underscore why getting algorithms right matters. Thoughtful oversight and governance are needed in addition to technical solutions. Next, let’s explore promising approaches.

How to Improve Algorithmic Accountability

With algorithms integrated into critical systems, stakeholders like technology leaders, lawmakers, and civil rights advocates are proposing solutions for enhanced accountability:

Invest in Robust and Ethical Development

Adopting rigorous processes during design and testing tailored to the application’s sensitivity can enhance algorithmic fairness:

• Perform ethical threat modeling to identify potential harms early.
• Leverage diverse and representative training data.
• Institute internal and external oversight in development workflows.
• Conduct continuous safety testing across edge cases.
• Implement fail-safes and circuit breakers.
• Provide guardrails for high-risk applications like healthcare.

Techniques like AI Safety engineering and Responsible AI help operationalize such best practices.

Improve Transparency

Making algorithms more interpretable demystifies their decision-making process and builds trust:

• Adopt simpler, explainable models where viable over black boxes.
• Generate explanations along with each prediction.
• Enable third-party auditing through design documentation.
• Disclose data flows, transformations, and scoring methods.
• Report regularly on metrics like errors and bias, highlighting improvements.

Transparency also aids diagnosing flaws faster. But it requires overcoming corporate secrecy.

Integrate Human Oversight

Humans-in-the-loop checks enhance accountability and handle edge cases:

• Enable human override of high-risk model predictions.
• Have humans monitor systems and flag anomalies in real time.
• Perform manual sanity checks on inputs and outputs.
• Incorporate user feedback into the model’s training loop.

While increasing costs, human oversight is prudent for high-stakes applications of AI.

Develop Unbiased Data Pipelines

Ensure that data feeding the algorithms is fair and inclusive:

• Proactively remove biases and distortions in datasets.
• Avoid using demographics-encoded variables as proxies leading to exclusion.
• Collect consent and provide opt-out options to generate unbiased data pools.
• Adopt rigorous data cleaning and labeling protocols.
• Continuously monitor datasets and algorithms for emerging biased associations.

Unbiased data is the first step to equitable algorithmic systems.

Enact Stronger Regulations

Laws that dictate oversight, liability, and transparency around algorithms can shape markets:

• Require fairness assessments and audits, especially for public agencies.
• Institute penalties for harmful failures based on scale and severity.
• Make transparency mandatory, within reason, for high-risk algorithms.
• Forbid certain ethically dangerous use cases outright until accuracy improves.
• Standardize definitions, evaluation methods, and reporting requirements.

Thoughtful regulation provides guardrails without throttling innovation. But global norms are still emerging.

Through a combination of voluntary best practices, public pressure, and regulation, there are paths to making algorithms more robust, fair, and humane. But achieving this also requires raising public awareness on the topic – which brings us to the next section.

Educating the Public on Algorithmic Accountability

For holistic progress on curtailing algorithmic harms, educating the non-technical public is equally crucial:

• Increase society’s algorithm literacy through educational initiatives, media, and public events.
• Encourage critical questioning of how algorithmic tools arrive at predictions affecting daily life.
• Push for transparency requirements so the public can better scrutinize vendors and agencies.
• Debunk hype and clarify limitations regarding what today’s AI systems can actually achieve.
• Advocate for participatory design of algorithms affecting the public.
• Highlight positive examples of algorithms improving lives when crafted responsibly.

Public pressure influences government policies and makes the business case for ethical AI practices stronger. Broadening understanding of this complex issue is key.

Additionally, promoting diversity in AI development teams helps make algorithmic systems more reflective of society. But education is just the starting point. Translating improved awareness into lasting accountability mechanisms remains the bigger challenge.

The Path Forward: Making Algorithms More Reliable

The risks posed by defective algorithms are apparent, but so is AI’s immense potential when thoughtfully implemented. Moving forward requires nuance, vigilance and collaboration between all stakeholders:

• Policymakers crafting nimble regulations to safeguard public interests without constraining progress.
• Businesses investing in robust AI development cycles and embracing transparency.
• Independent auditors acting as watchdogs and identifying blind spots.
• Researchers furthering techniques for explainability, adversarial testing, and bias mitigation.
• Domain experts providing critical contextual guidance for real-world deployment.
• Public interest groups voicing concerns and cautioning against unchecked proliferation.

With care, foresight, and a laser focus on mitigating harm above all, the AI community can deliver on algorithms that uplift rather than oppress.

The road ahead will have bumps, but the destination is well worth striving for – a future where algorithmic tools are responsive, accessible, and enrich lives universally. If we can achieve this vision, AI can transform society for the better instead of merely reinforcing the worst of historical biases.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of harmful algorithm errors that impacted people’s lives?

• COMPAS algorithm used in US courts incorrectly flagged black defendants as high recidivism risk nearly twice as often as white defendants. This led to harsher parole decisions.
• UK visa approval algorithm had a 10% higher rejection rate for African applicants compared to Europeans due to built-in biases.
• Apple Card’s credit limit algorithm discriminated against women, assigning them 20X lower credit than men with similar profiles.
• Emotion detection algorithms like Affectiva have much higher error rates for non-white faces, leading to harmful assumptions.
• Amazon’s Rekognition tool misidentified 28 congresspersons of color as arrested criminals due to poor accuracy.

How can businesses minimize risks around implementing algorithms?

• Perform extensive requirements analysis and safety testing before deployment in products or processes.
• Implement human