> Another scandal emerged recently when it was revealed that Amazon’s same-day delivery service was unavailable for ZIP codes in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Without knowing the details behind this, it seems likely that Amazon and other web companies could be been "discriminatory" for purely business reasons. Predominantly black neighborhoods are likely to spend less totally and per customer than average, especially in urban areas where blacks are on the bottom of high inequality. Amazon provides greater service to wealthier neighborhoods for the same reasons as brick and mortar businesses.
I'm reminded of msft's first generation kinect, which had much more trouble identifying a players face if it was African American, versus caucasian. Unintentionally racist, although I would hardly blame the algorithms.
Hillarious that the writer cherry picked examples worse than any ML programmer ever would by accident or malign disinterest. If the writer had been forced (as they imply programmers should be) to include examples from South Korea (lots of good ML work going on there) or China (Baidu etc) the article would have fallen apart.
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[ 14.1 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadWithout knowing the details behind this, it seems likely that Amazon and other web companies could be been "discriminatory" for purely business reasons. Predominantly black neighborhoods are likely to spend less totally and per customer than average, especially in urban areas where blacks are on the bottom of high inequality. Amazon provides greater service to wealthier neighborhoods for the same reasons as brick and mortar businesses.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-kinect-has-trouble...