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The Myth of Complete AI-Fairness

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Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12721))

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Abstract

Just recently, IBM invited me to participate in a panel titled “Will AI ever be completely fair?” My first reaction was that it surely would be a very short panel, as the only possible answer is ‘no’. In this short paper, I wish to further motivate my position in that debate: “I will never be completely fair. Nothing ever is. The point is not complete fairness, but the need to establish metrics and thresholds for fairness that ensure trust in AI systems”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As quoted by Kate Crawford on Twitter https://twitter.com/katecrawford/status/1377551240146522115; 1 April 2021.

  2. 2.

    https://facctconference.org/.

  3. 3.

    This example is at the core of the well-known Propublica investigations of the COMPAS algorithms used by courts in the US to determine recidivism risk: www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compasrecidivism-algorithm.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/Trusted-AI/AIF360.

  5. 5.

    https://pair-code.github.io/what-if-tool/index.html#about.

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Correspondence to Virginia Dignum .

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Dignum, V. (2021). The Myth of Complete AI-Fairness. In: Tucker, A., Henriques Abreu, P., Cardoso, J., Pereira Rodrigues, P., Riaño, D. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIME 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12721. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77211-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77211-6_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77210-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77211-6

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