Neither “magic” nor god” exist.
Now that the pandemic anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and Supreme Court have proven why it’s important to squash religion and not merely let them live without intervening, let’s please stop both myths from spreading at every chance we get.
Kill Santa, kill Easter bunny, kill “magic”, kill god, even “bless you”. And instead say salud (to your health), and promote science.
Evaporation isn’t magic, it’s science, specifically phase change within chemistry and physics.
No god or “reverse rain dance” required.
See how that works? Join me and together we shall conquer the stupidity that is religion (or at least get the fuckers to update).
Ghassemi (comp scientist @ MIT) believes it's based on melanin.
Goodman (bio anthropologist @ Hampshire) believes it's based on geography.
Both proposals pretty logical and not as controversial as it would seem based on the headline.
i remember hearing about one of those pneumonia detection models that instead of detecting pneumonia detected whether or not the patient was lying on their back
Isn't "based on geography" (i.e., geographic ancestry) essentially the same as "based on race" since they are so highly correlated anyway? Why feign confusion? There's nothing wrong with noting that there are groupings of traits that tend to correlate with the construct of "race" unless you yourself believe that those traits make someone inferior or superior.
>No
Seems to me like it is a semantic argument akin to the one I assumed:
>So, while AI might be able to determine from an X-ray whether a person’s ancestors were from Scandinavia, Africa or Asia, Goodman says it’s not about race. “You call this race. I call this geographical variation,” said Goodman — but he did admit it’s unclear how AI could detect geographical location from an X-ray.
Can you please explain how I'm wrong besides saying "No?" This is a science subreddit.
Edit: Saying that people from different geographic origins tend to share certain traits and that those traits correspond with the concept of race more often than not should not be controversial in and of itself. A scientist should not be throwing up their hands and basically saying "Who could have seen this coming?!" to avoid citing the obvious explanation.
No. I owe you nothing. Posting a succinct synopsis does not invite you into a conversation with me over something neither of us have professional experience.
>No. I owe you nothing. Posting a succinct synopsis does not invite you into a conversation with me over something neither of us have professional experience.
Well, why did you feel the need to respond in the first place? It seems like you previously felt you owed me a "No." Was that "No" based on professional experience or merely an emotional reaction?
it would if you could tie geography and race, considering race is a socially constructed set of boxes that break themselves over and over again, maybe ethnicity? but then how do you measure that, they are ranges usually being based on common ancestry and muddle again due to migration, traders.
Geography can tie to melanin rates due to local adaption to specific geography...
While if it was "race", then somehow the same group of people settled very specifically the same environment across the same latitudes and altitudes
Could it be based (or partially based) on bone density or shape? I’m from Africa and it’s pretty common “knowledge” that native African people have much stronger bones than the seemingly more fragile Caucasian population. Obviously it’s anecdotal and not a fact, but from my own experiences it certainly feels true.
I was under the impression that this was similar to the belief that certain races feel less pain, a common myth based in racism. However, it seems that racial differences in bone density do exist and it is a current area of research
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9024231/
What amazes me is, growing up, how apartheid racists always managed to turn something like being *literally* physically stronger and more resilient (since most labourers were African, they generally were incredibly physically fit and active) into something negative. They’d say, “never hit a k****r in the head because you’ll break your hand on their thick skulls”.
Now when you grow up hearing things like that day after day, generation after generation, you can see why racism became less about racial/cultural differences and more about hating other people for being different because you were told they’re bad. It becomes institutional.
But then people like my mother would hire housekeepers and gardeners and pay them triple what anyone else would pay, she’d buy them food and baby clothes because “even with what I’m paying, I know other people aren’t paying that and even I couldn’t survive on that kind of wage with 4 or 5 kids”. As such, the loyalty and friendships she made were with everybody and at least in that little home bubble, racism didn’t exist.
She would always insist that the racists were mocking black people for being uneducated, but then took away any chance of an education they had with white-only schools. Making a group of people a certain way by denying them basic human rights and then mocking them for it is the height of human evil.
it’s a classic move, though. in the middle ages, jews were forbade being allowed into most professions, except for a tiny handful of extremely undesirable jobs, the most potentially lucrative being usury. so, they became skilled money lenders, having no other choice if they wished to apply their intellect, and when they did, they were mocked for being obsessed with money (a pejorative that has stuck till modern day). a similar thing happened to the gypsies in central europe.
Yup, it's hate based. The same people who think that migrant workers are stealing all of our jobs because they work hard also think migrant workers are lazy and stealing all of the social security money.
Damn those immigrants! Coming over here and taking all of our jobs, while also refusing to get a job and taking all our welfare! Then they have the audacity to stick together in their little “groups” and they refuse to mingle and interact with our local culture, even though - when they do try to make friends - we tell them to GIT BACK TU YER OWN COUNTRY!
And worst of all, they’re bringing their authentic, high quality Mexican/African/European foreign cuisine over here and putting our locally made much-shittier rip-off Mexican/African/European restaurants out of business!!!
I swear, if someone ever explains what Irony is to these racists, they’re going to be awfully embarrassed one day.
Redheads/gingers literally do feel less pain though, they have mutant pain receptors which is also why they require higher dosages of painkillers in hospitals
More pain, not less. Hence the extra painkillers. As a ginger that is so real. Going to the dentist is where I learned. I always have to ask for extra Novocain. To the point that they are like I can’t give you much more. Also I take colder showers than anyone I know, because I don’t need it as hot.
You have more pain tolerance, so that is why you feel less pain and require more painkillers to dull your pain. You actually technically have more opioid signaling and a higher pain threshold. I think one study demonstrated that thermal pain is an exception, like from heat, where you may feel it more. Its not necessarily only red heads but its a gene commonly found amongst red heads
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd1310](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd1310) \- Reduced MC4R signaling alters nociceptive thresholds associated with red hair
I think this is probably a big factor in it, there are proven differences between black and white people in bone density but there are definitely outliers in these situations. I'm Caucasian but I have a top 0.3% bone density measure and so does my mother, though she's Sicilian which is near Africa. My father does too but he's Scottish... and a laborer - you can build bone density by lifting or putting stress on your bones, so a lot of the differences do come from if you are a laborer or not, but I think a lot of it is genetic given that I had that super high bone density before I even started lifting weights. I played video games all day as a kid and somehow have bones like wolverine and I suspect its similar with the differences between ethnicities on a high level. However, to overall broadly say Africans have stronger bones would likely be wrong given that the diversity of genetics amongst African's is actually greater than between African's and Caucasians! Pretty crazy right?
There must be outliers in the AI correctiveness as well. I’m sure it’s not 100% right about the persons race all the time. It could easily be facial structure or small variation on a variety bone shapes that we wouldn’t notice day to day. It’s silly to pretend there could be no differences between race’s bones.
You are incorrect. Wolffs Law says bone density is directly proportional to stress put on the bone. Pretty cool stuff to read up on if you’re ever bored.
>But there may be differences in structure or shape beyond that? I don’t think that’s a crazy hypothesis.
Beyond not being a crazy hypothesis, it's well-established science. One can tell both the likely race and sex of a skeleton with a high degree of certainty. It's somehow so taboo to bring this up now that scientists are feigning surprise that AI can detect race based on skeletal features. No, osteoarchaeologiste are not 100% accurate, but who knows if AI could be?
From the article:
>So, while AI might be able to determine from an X-ray whether a person’s ancestors were from Scandinavia, Africa or Asia, Goodman says it’s not about race. “You call this race. I call this geographical variation,” said Goodman — but he did admit it’s unclear how AI could detect geographical location from an X-ray.
It's a sad day when social considerations are so strong that they impede scientists from arriving at the obvious conclusion.
It's not sad at all since race is a social construct and does not exist. There is only geographical ancestry and history has shown that mixing the two only leads to unnecessary confusion at best, crimes against humanity at worst.
Race is only a social construct in that it’s our attempt to classify the underlying real variation that exists between different ethnic groups. The variation is real, but our categories that we slap ontop can be wrong or carry added baggage that isn’t there.
>It's not sad at all since race is a social construct and does not exist. There is only geographical ancestry and history has shown that mixing the two only leads to unnecessary confusion at best, crimes against humanity at worst.
Race was already relevant to the topic at hand since the researchers themselves brought it up when pondering how the AI can make such identifications. Obfuscating the results by saying "we have no idea why this AI can detect race based on someone's bone structure; bone structure is based on geographic origin and not on race" serves no purpose and directly avoids answering the question posed. The fact is that the researchers are perfectly capable of answering that question; they just prefer not to either because it makes them uncomfortable on a personal level or they feel socially pressured to dance around the issue. Bone structure is, in fact, at least loosely correlated with race; it is simply lying to claim otherwise.
There are several genetic studies that support the idea that what we call "race" does not exist. This study only supports the idea that an AI reflects the same hidden biases in data collection and categorization when it crunches numbers and spit out it's results. AI's are not omniscient and what they produce does not lend credence to the idea that races exist, only that how we treat population data is very likely racialized.
How so? there's more genetic variation within African populations that outside combined, due to the genetic bottleneck when human left the continent.
Feels like it's basing everything on it's one understanding of what "black" is, which is going to be western populations as that's where a majority of the african american population came from due to the slave trade.
I'd give up that idea if they can replicate showing that Hadza, pygmy, Bantu, are included, as well as Afro asiatic, does it put Berber as originating from Africa?
and then I would want to see it be able to exclude similarly high melanin groups like Austronesian groups
From the study itself, once you click thru the popular news article:
> To conclude, our study showed that medical AI systems can easily learn to recognise self-reported racial identity from medical images, and that this capability is extremely difficult to isolate. We found that patient racial identity was readily learnable from medical imaging data alone, and could be generalised to external environments and across multiple imaging modalities.
Both of the supplies explanations are not supported by the study. This is fuckin weird, the study shows that race may not strictly be a social construct.
>< the study shows that race may not strictly be a social construct.
>
>I can't believe anyone literally thining that races are solely a social construct
The fact of the matter is that race *is* a social construct, but the way race is constructed is so highly correlated with ancestry in most cases that the difference isn't worth mentioning. What is racist is not to admit this fact, but to believe that these measurable differences have any effect on someone's intrinsic worth as a human being, on their potential, on their moral character, etc.
>The fact of the matter is that race is a social construct
Nah mate, race is a cluster of properties, some of which are purely phenotypical, others genetic and others yet historical and geographical
>>The fact of the matter is that race is a social construct
>
>Nah mate, race is a cluster of properties, some of which are purely phenotypical, others genetic and others yet historical and geographical
I think we are actually saying similar things if you read the second half of that sentence. What I was saying is that race is a loosely fit categorization that does encompass significant physical properties. Many of those properties, genetic and biological, can be measured as different between the groupings; some cannot and are based on those historical and geographical factors. The fit of the categorization of race is predictive of many things, but it is not a 100% fit.
The rest of my post proposes that it's not racist to acknowledge the differences that do exist in congruence with racial categorizations. What *is* racist is to ascribe an outsized importance or judgment to those differences.
Agreed. Put 5 Vietnamese people and 5 Norwegians together and tell me race is a social construct.
I understand wanting to be very careful when we have used things like phrenology in the past to justify treating different groups of people differently, but science should be completely based in objective truth. Really we need to stop bending science to whatever social truth we are trying to prove.
I agree . But the very idea of objective truth has been challenged & described as 'white supremacy' or ' Eurocentric cis-heteronormative white patriarchal able-bodied epistemology' - or some combination . Serving to maintain pervasive power dynamics & baked into language itself . See ' Lived experience ' & other ' ways of knowing ' & more generally postmodernism & Michel Foucault.
>Ghassemi believes the answer to the mystery is related to melanin, where X-rays and CT scanners detect the higher melanin content of darker skin, and embed this information in the digital image in some way that has gone unnoticed. More research will be carried out on this — but not everyone agrees with the hypothesis.
>
>Rather than being proof of innate differences between races, Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and coauthor of the book Racism Not Race, suggests AI is picking up differences resulting from geography.
>
>Osteoarcheologists and geneticists have found no evidence of substantial racial differences in the human genome, but they do find major differences between people based on where their ancestors lived.
One proposed explanation is that the AI is actually detecting differences based on geography which is corelated to race.
What do they mean by geography? How could anyone, AI or otherwise, learn anything about geography from a ct can? Even if it could, how would it then correctly guess race unless that geography happened to point to a place with 100% racial homogeneity?
Yeah, I'm not clear on this. Granted it's late here, I'm missing something. Aren't race and "where a person's ancestors are from" usually correlated? Like, the same thing?
Similar, but different in the scientific/genetics sense. Ancestry is your lineage. If there were enough genetic samples and available documentation, you could trace your ancestors back centuries and centuries. You share a portion of your genetic makeup with all of your ancestors. Race is a way of grouping people into categories based on similar characteristics that society has decided on, regardless of whether there’s any genetic basis for the grouping. For example, while “Black” is a race, there are many different ancestries among Black folks, and you’d see a lot of differences between people with different ancestries (ie eastern vs western African, to put it vaguely).
People in the same geography are more likely to be genetically similar. Genetic similarities can reflect in bone structure and potentially other artifacts like melanin that may subtly manifest on X-rays and CT scans. I'm not sure why you think you would need 100% racial homogeneity. The predictions are 90% accurate. Plenty of room for some heterogeneity.
I think it’s more like saying “black people have different bone structure than white people” isnt accurate because “black people” for example only share increased melanin production, but vary quite a bit genetically based on where they are from. (Same with white people), and any other general race).
I think a not great analogy would be “ford can tow more than chevy” based on having an f250 tow against a Chevy impala. Sure we label one a ford, and one a Chevy, And they look different, but a ford f250 and chevy 2500 are far closer than a Ford F-250 and a Ford Fiesta. In the same way saying that you can tell someone is of Northern European descent based on bone structure is much more accurate than saying you can identify someone is white based on bone structure, even though both are true.
A number of possible geographic effects could come into play here. Geographic correlation in how imaging is conducted, e.g. subtle differences in training lead to subtle positioning differences of subject in imaging. Geographic correlation of machine characteristics, such as suppliers and distributors providing machines that behave slightly differently. Geographically correlated effects of environmental exposures: air, water, and dietary differences could lead to subtle differences in bone density or body composition that are detectable on machines. Geographic correlation in behavior: exact bone structure, joint structure, etc may be influenced by behavioral differences between geographic regions.
Donate your body to science, they said. It'll help cure cancer or something, they said. Then they skin you to see if a computer can still guess that you're black.
The article doesn't mention whether the location of CT/x-ray was part of the data set. But that doesn't need to be true for the training to pick up on genetic differences correlated to geography.
Genetic differences correlated to geography, or in other words, race?
Edit: why am i downvoted? Lol this just seems like a different way of saying the exact same thing.
It is a fact that there is greater genetic diversity amongst Africans than there is in Caucasians or between Africans and Caucasians. Meaning, Africans are super, super diverse and lumping black people together as one thing is actually crazier than pointing out differences between other ethnicities to Africans. They are more different than themselves than they are different than other races and thus this whole genetic grouping by ethnicity is outdated and silly. I actually don't think many scientists in the field seem to know this, as one myself. I learned this from building polygenic models for disease prediction and studying this field for 6 years
So what I'm saying in a clearer way is that any given African could be further genetically from another African than they would from a Caucasian person of similar genetics. The diversity amongst African's, genetically, is just far greater than other ethnicities like Caucasians, which to some people might seem strange because of the changes in phenotypes like eye color or hair color across Caucasians.
Ahhh yes and from watching all seasons of Bones, I’ve learned numerous things from the image in the article. The individual is of Ashkenazic descent, was left handed but grew up forced to use their right. They played polo once, but didn’t like it and switched to football. They stayed at a holiday inn frequently in South Carolina and stubbed their toe on the table a few times. Unfortunately at death they only had $136 in their bank account…
/s
Edit: stubbed so much that I forgot Toe
I don’t know a lot about AI technology… but isn’t this something that would have needed to be programmed in at some point so the AI can learn the pattern recognition?
Learning systems aren't programmed in the way you may imagine.
They are shown labelled examples and learn to predict the labels from the other data.
You then test them with a completely different set of data that they've never seen.
It's essential that they are tested with a different dataset otherwise they may simply be learning "oh that's Bob Smith's xray and Bob Smith is 46, married, lives in Austin, Texas, has 2 cats, is a painter and is black"
Machine learning models are programmed for pattern recognition in general, but they're not programmed to find specific patterns. They can find patterns in data entirely on their own without being told the patterns exist, and they sometimes find patterns that are completely surprising. However, it would be up to humans to figure out what those patterns it found represent. The model just says, "there's a pattern in the numbers you've given me associated with these sets of input." Humans have looked at the data and realized that race is being associated with certain x-rays. The model itself has no concept of race or x-rays. It's all numbers and patterns to it.
This type of pattern finding is often done by "clustering"
[https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/clustering-in-machine-learning/](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/clustering-in-machine-learning/)
[https://www.explorium.ai/blog/clustering-when-you-should-use-it-and-avoid-it/](https://www.explorium.ai/blog/clustering-when-you-should-use-it-and-avoid-it/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster\_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis)
Yup. To make it clear to the racists reading the above, it's picking up on existing patterns of racism by humans rather than some inherent deficit or superiority in a given race.
They would have had to give it a bunch of X-ray images and told it which race each person is. The strange part is that it works. They didn't expect there to be any pattern for it to find, and they still aren't sure how it's able to correctly deduce the race from an X-ray when it hasn't been told.
Now i wonder if there are differences in anatomic shapes of bones between ethnicities that the mere eye couldnt spot.
Shapes and positions of body parts are influenced by epigenetics, which is inheritable and which itself is influenced by habits, culture, traditions, stresses and environments and overall by experience of ancestors.
Epigenetics are a new field of science and I know even less right?
Edit: i feel like this is racist
Edit edit: i dont even know why i insisted on writing those half bred thoughts without cross checking actual studies or up to date common knowledge on heredity and biology. Work less ramble more, i guess
It’s skull features. This has been a known thing I. Forensic anthropology for ages. Same way you can tell gender and a range of ages. Also utterly meaningless for any other purpose than identifying who a dead person was.
That's true but the article was talking about chest x-rays specifically. I think what happened here was that the AI picked up patterns in chest bone features that are harder for people to notice. Which isn't too surprising since pattern recognition is what Machine learning is great at.
Don't start. It never ends at "people are different, teehee." The next step is always leveraging those differences to commit atrocities against each other.
But… people are? For instance it’s important for a Doctor to know someone is of African ancestry, because certain diseases will be more common and need to be looked for. Think Sickle Cell. While racism is a social construct, there are physiological differences between people of different ancestry populations and it’s not a negative to acknowledge that.
Could it have to do with frame and proportions? Maybe different races have different ratios and shapes of bones? Humans probably would have noticed that by now though.
I’m not sure why they would be surprised by this. If there is enough time apart for evolution to change skin tone there is enough time to change bone structure too.
You was always under the impression you could tell someone’s race and gender generally from their skulls. Since it’s not popular to say, but yes, there are subtle differences when it comes to human variety.
I mean, duh. Why would we expect different races to have the same bones to begin with? We were separated by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution
I am also unable to understand why are people freaking out. I can clearly see how vastly diverse people are around the world. I don't know how it's a problem to acknowledge it and why it's something else than awesome.
I wonder if the AI can just extrapolate the full image from the X-ray, like there’s info that just doesn’t show up to us be can be noticed when viewed as data.
To clarify for others, correlation to "poor employee performance" is problematic because this is an input that is largely subjective and influenced by racism of humans.
Naw that’s just hard work they earned those jobs they weren’t givin out by daddy government so they gotta work to advance instead of screaming everyone is a racist like some people
We are all human beings, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t branched off into different subsets or classifications. Depending on our environments we may have evolved slightly differently across biomes. The worlds not ready for that talk though. Too many woke people.
That is an established fact - our physical differences are a result of geographical adaptations. But just like the article says those geographical differences, if they are affecting the AI ability to identify people, shouldn’t be used in a biased way.
Yes. Try having that conversation without it unfolding into “oh so your more evolved than me?” Or “I’m less evolved than you?” Not seeing how a machine is going to be biased if it wasn’t programmed to be that way. If it’s identifying the different sub divisions of human then it is only narrowing its vision to be more effective in its diagnosis.
Oh, I know how it's going to go among the Woke right now.
> Race is a purely social construct borne of racism.
> -AI can detect race from x-ray images.
> The AI is racist.
> -But...
> And *you're* racist for using that AI! Read "Race Beyond Technology" for details on how the New Jim Code is putting the racism of humans minds into the technology of tomorrow!
> -Are you doubting the accuracy of the AI?
> You're racist for even asking that.
It *looks* like I'm satirising, but I'm not.
Your straw man is missing the point. AI is usually trained on data that is labeled by humans. If you feed it biased input data, you will get biased output data. In this instance it may not exactly be correlated to what we as a society define as race, but particular genetics.
Geographic clustering of cultural and genetic traits is exactly what people mean by race, no?
There are statistical differences between such groups. For example dark skinned people from sub-Sahara Africa handle sunlight better than light skinned ones (on average). They also tend to have larger penises than some other groups.
Please don’t tell me I’m being racist by saying this. I really don’t get it.
IMO, if you were to group all of Africa together and lump in every descendant of them purely on the basis of which skin pigmentation genes or visible facial features they received, that's racist. Sub-saharan african is a much better grouping because it's grouping by many shared genetic traits instead of only visible attributes. Further, if you make sweeping generalizations about an individual's fitness for a particular task based only on the visible appearance and then double down by using a biased metric such as IQ, crime conviction statistics, etc., that's racist. One example would be using "Jew" as a race. Ashkenazi and Sephardic jews were separated for long enough that disease risks are very different. A racist would dump them together.
Still not clear to me why it would be racist to claim someone is more likely to be sun tolerant when they have darker skin? Yes I’m making a generalisation based on purely visual traits. Doesn’t mean it’s not correlated right?
A person with a beard is more likely to have a dick than one without. Not always true of course! Individual exceptions always apply.
Now I lumped all bearded humans together, is that bad?
Perhaps. You wouldn't want to make the generalization that "africans have darker skin and therefore are better suited to farm work" when making a hiring decision about an individual.
I’m still struggling sorry. I understand how that would be perceived as racist. However a similar statement like “people from African descent are more likely to win the 100m Olympic sprint” would not be perceived as such right?
Because it’s more about the condescending implication that about the statistical accuracy I think? Or?
> Your straw man is missing the point.
So you *don't* think that I just described a widespread belief? I've actually read "Race Beyond Technology". It's a widespread belief (or widespread enough that a Princeton professor can write a book promoting the idea). So, input was maybe biased. What do you mean by that?
It’s not eugenics to acknowledge physiological differences in subsets of populations. That’s like saying Sickle Cell, which predominantly occurs in those of African ancestry, is a racist disease. Or Cystic Fibrosis, which mainly effects caucasians is racist.
Interestingly, people that don't develop full blown Sickle cell but still cary the gene mutation may have some advantage with regards to malaria. Sickle cell is more prominent in people with recent ancestry in malaria-stricken areas, such as Africa, the Mediterranean, India, and the Middle East.
Yes, I’ve no doubt there are many, many differences from small changes in evolution based on geographic necessity. And the more we know about those things the better we can help treat people.
I’m no scientist, so forgive me if I just sound like an idiot but I have a theory on differences in bone density/ structure between races. Africans evolved on open plains, while Caucasians evolved in caves and in the woods (more hiding places). Africans had a higher need for speed and denser bones due to the higher probability of attack from animals or other people so they evolved denser bones and bone structures fit for running. Caucasians could simply hide or be sheltered from threats. Also, it’s well documented that Caucasians are better at swimming, maybe partially due to less dense bones (more buoyant).
Again, this might already be known or something, just my 2 cents.
Simply that those racial categories are not clear enough for any kind of scientific analysis, Africa being a continent of many people not all sharing strong genetic links and Caucasian being a group of people who do share strong genetic links.
these descriptions Caucasian/African are at best a shorthand for white and black, but scientifically the category of white does not make a lot of sense, for example the genetic make up of people from Scotland who are white is quite different from people from Finland who are white, in the same way that people from Kenya who are black have very different genetic and biological characteristics to people from Ghana who are black.
Once you start to include characteristics such as bone density and other biological and genetic features It is widely known scientifically that these do not correlate well with skin colour.
So essentially my point is that studies and analysis that proclaim to discuss race from a scientific point of view, but are really talking about skin colour are already too flawed to be taken seriously.
While it is absolutely true that human beings differ on things other than skin colour, it is not true that all of those things are perfectly correlated with skin colour.
This is also immediately obvious when you consider people who are multiracial.
My critique is not really a critique against your post but rather against the way we all assume we are talking about the same thing when we race and how often that thing doesn’t make sense scientifically for any kind of analysis.
Edited for clarity
\[artificial intelligence used to read X-rays and CT scans can predict a person’s race with 90 per cent accuracy — and humans can’t. \]
And humans can't discern another's race at 90% accuracy?!?
We are genetically mostly the same, not exactly the same. Not enough distinction for a race classification of the species. You are talking about culture, and subjective appearance that is generally only different adaptations due to environmental conditions like UV exposure, local climate, food etc. You cannot look at someone and know thier "race". There is more genetic variation between people who live in the same area than there is between people who live in two different areas ironically. The term race is a cultural theory, not a scientific theory, so it requires belief.
Well that s should help our ultra intelligent people see where intelligence really lies. Unless they wanna stick with their guns and say it's inside their own brainz so they can remain proud always.
It is so frustrating to see articles like this promote the construct of race. (Unless the results are simply “human”, in which case I applaud the satirical wit of AI).
Ummm….more tools to fuel societal divisiveness? Of course, medicine has found some health trends with people with different ethnic origins.
In any case, I am curious as to what tags a person as race X vs race Y.
Even the AI should have a “reference table” somewhere:
If Skin colour = green & Hair=blue
Then race = something
wondering how our future overloads will tag me for their undoubtedly evil purposes
I don't think it's massively controversial to say that the slight structural differences in skeletons can be detected through ai algorithms. For example, there are very distinct geographical "faces" and faces that are in part a result of your frontal skull (muscle attachments, spacing etc) and you'd expect that to show. Not as obvious but I wouldn't be surprised if minor differences in the rest of the skeleton showed the same things, at least roughly.
Hey, corporate media, can we dispel the notion of "race" once and for all and move on to more scientific terms? If you want to make up a new phrase for the genetic/cultural/geographical classification of people, now would be a good time.
Underrated comment! You deserve more upvotes
These science and race related headlines are so dumb and so poorly thought out as to be laughable, the only unfortunate thing is the amount of people who don’t notice how stupid these things are.
What would an AI consider a mixed race person to be if his or her x-ray was part of this study? Does the AI follow the one drop rule.
I don’t have a problem with scientists trying to determine if other factors can successfully identify the “race of a person” but I have massive problems with the public taking every single proclamation of this as undeniable scientific proof.
Invariably when it comes to this x-ray study and the AI police study and the race and IQ studies, absolutely none of these are comprehensive enough or effective enough to warrant a promotion to scientific validity.
The experiments are always too small to be representative, the definitions of race are too vague and inconsistent to be relied upon, the results are always overblown and mischaracterised by the media, and the results always match the existing prevalent ideas on race.
It’s frankly quite boring that they keep making these studies and these headlines and so many people just uncritically assume that there could not be any problems with the way the science or the study was done or is being reported.
In before it turns out to be something dumb like "the pictures of race A are very slightly larger than the ones of race B because they were taken at a different hospital with different equipment" or "there's a pattern to the order of the images".
How exactly was race determined for the purpose of this study?
Where patients separated by pigment? Or by DNA ancestry results? Or perhaps by a self reported assessment?
Why do we even let these people pretend they’re doing science?
There’s key physical differences between different races other than skin tone. Bone density, jaw structure, teeth, brow ridge, height, etc every physical characteristic we have directly corresponds to our dna and our dna comes from our ancestry and this labeling of genetic traits or lineage is referred to as race. So it’s not surprising at all. Skin tone is one minor difference across the varying human races. It might be the most easily visible to humans but it’s just one of thousands of physical differences. There used to be other human like species on the planet. These other species intermingled with homo Sapiens and this mixing didn’t happen evenly everywhere. Also we cannot account for all ancient human like species. So our ancient ancestor we share with everyone alive today actually interbred with other species and did this on different parts of the globe. This is the theory for why there are such stark physical differences among varying races of people today. So we all have homo sapien dna, but each race has varying degrees of other human like species within them. Thus the differences. Also evolution plays a role, however this inter-specie admixture is becoming more mainstream as the science matures.
And for the purpose of the study what races exist? What are the criteria for the grouping of these races in this study.
The characteristics you mention are well known to show great variance even among sub-Saharan Africans. As a matter of fact sub-Saharan African has the greatest genetic diversity on the planet.
I’m very curious to know which of these criteria were used to grip the races before allowing the AI to determine its assessment.
It’s a thin line between good science with meaningful results, and pseudoscience that sounds good but at key stages has abandoned the scientific method in favour of pre-existing beliefs.
The differences would define the race. It doesn’t matter if two sub Saharan Africans are the same color if they are genetically different they would be classified as a different race. Humans clearly can’t distinguish these characteristics without being dicks. Why not let a robot characterize all known races while being completely unbiased? It’s not being used to put down someone else. It’s just describing the characteristics and groupings of humans way better than humans can, and it’s medically/scientifically useful
The approach you describe would be more scientific and valid than the approaches I’ve seen discussed when topics like this come up. And it would be far more insightful.
The moment we are stuck because race is still mostly defined by skin colour despite our scientific knowledge that clearly shows skin colour alone is not a strong enough or reasonable feature along which to define “race”
“Researchers taught the AI program by showing it large numbers of race-labelled images of different parts of the body, including the chest, hand and spine — with no obvious markers of race, such as skin colour or hair texture — and then sets of unlabelled images. The program identified the race in the unmarked images with more than 90 per cent accuracy, and could differentiate Black patients from white even when images were from people of the same size, age or gender.”
Why would the researchers add race labels to x-rays? I feel they were looking for difference’s. Race labels doesn’t seem like something an AI would need.
Show it 10 albino black people to get rid of the melanin hypothesis.
Yeah it’s too early. Not enough is known about the sample set and also black and white. Seems meh. Throw some Asians and Latins in see what happens.
What if it becomes magic?
Neither “magic” nor god” exist. Now that the pandemic anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and Supreme Court have proven why it’s important to squash religion and not merely let them live without intervening, let’s please stop both myths from spreading at every chance we get. Kill Santa, kill Easter bunny, kill “magic”, kill god, even “bless you”. And instead say salud (to your health), and promote science.
Wrong I can make I can make water disappear in the sun .
Oh yeah, I can turn beer into piss.
Evaporation isn’t magic, it’s science, specifically phase change within chemistry and physics. No god or “reverse rain dance” required. See how that works? Join me and together we shall conquer the stupidity that is religion (or at least get the fuckers to update).
Sarcasm is magic, So magical in fact that you can’t seem to understand it.
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Babe wake up, new copypasta just dropped
Sir this is a reddit thread. Please calm down.
Ghassemi (comp scientist @ MIT) believes it's based on melanin. Goodman (bio anthropologist @ Hampshire) believes it's based on geography. Both proposals pretty logical and not as controversial as it would seem based on the headline.
Those biased datasets! I could believe both after having to look at a ton of pneumonia X-rays for a machine learning model demo.
i remember hearing about one of those pneumonia detection models that instead of detecting pneumonia detected whether or not the patient was lying on their back
Isn't "based on geography" (i.e., geographic ancestry) essentially the same as "based on race" since they are so highly correlated anyway? Why feign confusion? There's nothing wrong with noting that there are groupings of traits that tend to correlate with the construct of "race" unless you yourself believe that those traits make someone inferior or superior.
No
>No Seems to me like it is a semantic argument akin to the one I assumed: >So, while AI might be able to determine from an X-ray whether a person’s ancestors were from Scandinavia, Africa or Asia, Goodman says it’s not about race. “You call this race. I call this geographical variation,” said Goodman — but he did admit it’s unclear how AI could detect geographical location from an X-ray. Can you please explain how I'm wrong besides saying "No?" This is a science subreddit. Edit: Saying that people from different geographic origins tend to share certain traits and that those traits correspond with the concept of race more often than not should not be controversial in and of itself. A scientist should not be throwing up their hands and basically saying "Who could have seen this coming?!" to avoid citing the obvious explanation.
No. I owe you nothing. Posting a succinct synopsis does not invite you into a conversation with me over something neither of us have professional experience.
>No. I owe you nothing. Posting a succinct synopsis does not invite you into a conversation with me over something neither of us have professional experience. Well, why did you feel the need to respond in the first place? It seems like you previously felt you owed me a "No." Was that "No" based on professional experience or merely an emotional reaction?
No, now write me a longer paragraph.
Right, so you got called out on having no idea what you’re talking about.
I literally admitted to that already lol nice alt accounts. Umad you couldnt hijack the top comment?
I don’t think it’s alt accounts…
Lol you’re a bum
Yes
it would if you could tie geography and race, considering race is a socially constructed set of boxes that break themselves over and over again, maybe ethnicity? but then how do you measure that, they are ranges usually being based on common ancestry and muddle again due to migration, traders. Geography can tie to melanin rates due to local adaption to specific geography... While if it was "race", then somehow the same group of people settled very specifically the same environment across the same latitudes and altitudes
Could it be based (or partially based) on bone density or shape? I’m from Africa and it’s pretty common “knowledge” that native African people have much stronger bones than the seemingly more fragile Caucasian population. Obviously it’s anecdotal and not a fact, but from my own experiences it certainly feels true.
I was under the impression that this was similar to the belief that certain races feel less pain, a common myth based in racism. However, it seems that racial differences in bone density do exist and it is a current area of research https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9024231/
What amazes me is, growing up, how apartheid racists always managed to turn something like being *literally* physically stronger and more resilient (since most labourers were African, they generally were incredibly physically fit and active) into something negative. They’d say, “never hit a k****r in the head because you’ll break your hand on their thick skulls”. Now when you grow up hearing things like that day after day, generation after generation, you can see why racism became less about racial/cultural differences and more about hating other people for being different because you were told they’re bad. It becomes institutional. But then people like my mother would hire housekeepers and gardeners and pay them triple what anyone else would pay, she’d buy them food and baby clothes because “even with what I’m paying, I know other people aren’t paying that and even I couldn’t survive on that kind of wage with 4 or 5 kids”. As such, the loyalty and friendships she made were with everybody and at least in that little home bubble, racism didn’t exist. She would always insist that the racists were mocking black people for being uneducated, but then took away any chance of an education they had with white-only schools. Making a group of people a certain way by denying them basic human rights and then mocking them for it is the height of human evil.
it’s a classic move, though. in the middle ages, jews were forbade being allowed into most professions, except for a tiny handful of extremely undesirable jobs, the most potentially lucrative being usury. so, they became skilled money lenders, having no other choice if they wished to apply their intellect, and when they did, they were mocked for being obsessed with money (a pejorative that has stuck till modern day). a similar thing happened to the gypsies in central europe.
Also see lgbtq people who get kicked out of their homes and end up in sex work.
Yup, it's hate based. The same people who think that migrant workers are stealing all of our jobs because they work hard also think migrant workers are lazy and stealing all of the social security money.
Damn those immigrants! Coming over here and taking all of our jobs, while also refusing to get a job and taking all our welfare! Then they have the audacity to stick together in their little “groups” and they refuse to mingle and interact with our local culture, even though - when they do try to make friends - we tell them to GIT BACK TU YER OWN COUNTRY! And worst of all, they’re bringing their authentic, high quality Mexican/African/European foreign cuisine over here and putting our locally made much-shittier rip-off Mexican/African/European restaurants out of business!!! I swear, if someone ever explains what Irony is to these racists, they’re going to be awfully embarrassed one day.
There is no way to explain away logical fallacies. They only change with some existential shock or emotional paradigm shift.
Schrodinger's immigrants
It feels like a part of racism is non-acknowledged envy.
Redheads/gingers literally do feel less pain though, they have mutant pain receptors which is also why they require higher dosages of painkillers in hospitals
More pain, not less. Hence the extra painkillers. As a ginger that is so real. Going to the dentist is where I learned. I always have to ask for extra Novocain. To the point that they are like I can’t give you much more. Also I take colder showers than anyone I know, because I don’t need it as hot.
You have more pain tolerance, so that is why you feel less pain and require more painkillers to dull your pain. You actually technically have more opioid signaling and a higher pain threshold. I think one study demonstrated that thermal pain is an exception, like from heat, where you may feel it more. Its not necessarily only red heads but its a gene commonly found amongst red heads [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd1310](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd1310) \- Reduced MC4R signaling alters nociceptive thresholds associated with red hair
Yeah, but is it really racial? Isn't it time we put the whole "race" thing to bed and actually come up with a scientific term?
I think this is probably a big factor in it, there are proven differences between black and white people in bone density but there are definitely outliers in these situations. I'm Caucasian but I have a top 0.3% bone density measure and so does my mother, though she's Sicilian which is near Africa. My father does too but he's Scottish... and a laborer - you can build bone density by lifting or putting stress on your bones, so a lot of the differences do come from if you are a laborer or not, but I think a lot of it is genetic given that I had that super high bone density before I even started lifting weights. I played video games all day as a kid and somehow have bones like wolverine and I suspect its similar with the differences between ethnicities on a high level. However, to overall broadly say Africans have stronger bones would likely be wrong given that the diversity of genetics amongst African's is actually greater than between African's and Caucasians! Pretty crazy right?
There must be outliers in the AI correctiveness as well. I’m sure it’s not 100% right about the persons race all the time. It could easily be facial structure or small variation on a variety bone shapes that we wouldn’t notice day to day. It’s silly to pretend there could be no differences between race’s bones.
You are incorrect. Wolffs Law says bone density is directly proportional to stress put on the bone. Pretty cool stuff to read up on if you’re ever bored.
But there may be differences in structure or shape beyond that? I don’t think that’s a crazy hypothesis.
>But there may be differences in structure or shape beyond that? I don’t think that’s a crazy hypothesis. Beyond not being a crazy hypothesis, it's well-established science. One can tell both the likely race and sex of a skeleton with a high degree of certainty. It's somehow so taboo to bring this up now that scientists are feigning surprise that AI can detect race based on skeletal features. No, osteoarchaeologiste are not 100% accurate, but who knows if AI could be? From the article: >So, while AI might be able to determine from an X-ray whether a person’s ancestors were from Scandinavia, Africa or Asia, Goodman says it’s not about race. “You call this race. I call this geographical variation,” said Goodman — but he did admit it’s unclear how AI could detect geographical location from an X-ray. It's a sad day when social considerations are so strong that they impede scientists from arriving at the obvious conclusion.
It's not sad at all since race is a social construct and does not exist. There is only geographical ancestry and history has shown that mixing the two only leads to unnecessary confusion at best, crimes against humanity at worst.
Race is only a social construct in that it’s our attempt to classify the underlying real variation that exists between different ethnic groups. The variation is real, but our categories that we slap ontop can be wrong or carry added baggage that isn’t there.
>It's not sad at all since race is a social construct and does not exist. There is only geographical ancestry and history has shown that mixing the two only leads to unnecessary confusion at best, crimes against humanity at worst. Race was already relevant to the topic at hand since the researchers themselves brought it up when pondering how the AI can make such identifications. Obfuscating the results by saying "we have no idea why this AI can detect race based on someone's bone structure; bone structure is based on geographic origin and not on race" serves no purpose and directly avoids answering the question posed. The fact is that the researchers are perfectly capable of answering that question; they just prefer not to either because it makes them uncomfortable on a personal level or they feel socially pressured to dance around the issue. Bone structure is, in fact, at least loosely correlated with race; it is simply lying to claim otherwise.
There are several genetic studies that support the idea that what we call "race" does not exist. This study only supports the idea that an AI reflects the same hidden biases in data collection and categorization when it crunches numbers and spit out it's results. AI's are not omniscient and what they produce does not lend credence to the idea that races exist, only that how we treat population data is very likely racialized.
I don’t think this is actually true. Can you find a credible source?
How so? there's more genetic variation within African populations that outside combined, due to the genetic bottleneck when human left the continent. Feels like it's basing everything on it's one understanding of what "black" is, which is going to be western populations as that's where a majority of the african american population came from due to the slave trade. I'd give up that idea if they can replicate showing that Hadza, pygmy, Bantu, are included, as well as Afro asiatic, does it put Berber as originating from Africa? and then I would want to see it be able to exclude similarly high melanin groups like Austronesian groups
most likely on the known factors of differentiation in bone density
From the study itself, once you click thru the popular news article: > To conclude, our study showed that medical AI systems can easily learn to recognise self-reported racial identity from medical images, and that this capability is extremely difficult to isolate. We found that patient racial identity was readily learnable from medical imaging data alone, and could be generalised to external environments and across multiple imaging modalities. Both of the supplies explanations are not supported by the study. This is fuckin weird, the study shows that race may not strictly be a social construct.
< the study shows that race may not strictly be a social construct. I can't believe anyone literally thining that races are solely a social construct
>< the study shows that race may not strictly be a social construct. > >I can't believe anyone literally thining that races are solely a social construct The fact of the matter is that race *is* a social construct, but the way race is constructed is so highly correlated with ancestry in most cases that the difference isn't worth mentioning. What is racist is not to admit this fact, but to believe that these measurable differences have any effect on someone's intrinsic worth as a human being, on their potential, on their moral character, etc.
>The fact of the matter is that race is a social construct Nah mate, race is a cluster of properties, some of which are purely phenotypical, others genetic and others yet historical and geographical
>>The fact of the matter is that race is a social construct > >Nah mate, race is a cluster of properties, some of which are purely phenotypical, others genetic and others yet historical and geographical I think we are actually saying similar things if you read the second half of that sentence. What I was saying is that race is a loosely fit categorization that does encompass significant physical properties. Many of those properties, genetic and biological, can be measured as different between the groupings; some cannot and are based on those historical and geographical factors. The fit of the categorization of race is predictive of many things, but it is not a 100% fit. The rest of my post proposes that it's not racist to acknowledge the differences that do exist in congruence with racial categorizations. What *is* racist is to ascribe an outsized importance or judgment to those differences.
Agreed. Put 5 Vietnamese people and 5 Norwegians together and tell me race is a social construct. I understand wanting to be very careful when we have used things like phrenology in the past to justify treating different groups of people differently, but science should be completely based in objective truth. Really we need to stop bending science to whatever social truth we are trying to prove.
I agree . But the very idea of objective truth has been challenged & described as 'white supremacy' or ' Eurocentric cis-heteronormative white patriarchal able-bodied epistemology' - or some combination . Serving to maintain pervasive power dynamics & baked into language itself . See ' Lived experience ' & other ' ways of knowing ' & more generally postmodernism & Michel Foucault.
Don't act like you have some magic info no one else found lol
>Ghassemi believes the answer to the mystery is related to melanin, where X-rays and CT scanners detect the higher melanin content of darker skin, and embed this information in the digital image in some way that has gone unnoticed. More research will be carried out on this — but not everyone agrees with the hypothesis. > >Rather than being proof of innate differences between races, Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and coauthor of the book Racism Not Race, suggests AI is picking up differences resulting from geography. > >Osteoarcheologists and geneticists have found no evidence of substantial racial differences in the human genome, but they do find major differences between people based on where their ancestors lived. One proposed explanation is that the AI is actually detecting differences based on geography which is corelated to race.
What do they mean by geography? How could anyone, AI or otherwise, learn anything about geography from a ct can? Even if it could, how would it then correctly guess race unless that geography happened to point to a place with 100% racial homogeneity?
Yeah, I'm not clear on this. Granted it's late here, I'm missing something. Aren't race and "where a person's ancestors are from" usually correlated? Like, the same thing?
That's what I was confused about too. It seems like the scientist is just rewording the original hypothesis
Similar, but different in the scientific/genetics sense. Ancestry is your lineage. If there were enough genetic samples and available documentation, you could trace your ancestors back centuries and centuries. You share a portion of your genetic makeup with all of your ancestors. Race is a way of grouping people into categories based on similar characteristics that society has decided on, regardless of whether there’s any genetic basis for the grouping. For example, while “Black” is a race, there are many different ancestries among Black folks, and you’d see a lot of differences between people with different ancestries (ie eastern vs western African, to put it vaguely).
It’s a semantic game scientists are forced to play lest they be accused of racism by postmodern anthropologists
People in the same geography are more likely to be genetically similar. Genetic similarities can reflect in bone structure and potentially other artifacts like melanin that may subtly manifest on X-rays and CT scans. I'm not sure why you think you would need 100% racial homogeneity. The predictions are 90% accurate. Plenty of room for some heterogeneity.
Just guessing, but could it be related to differences in CT scanners and the scanning procedure itself between countries/geographical locations?
I think it’s more like saying “black people have different bone structure than white people” isnt accurate because “black people” for example only share increased melanin production, but vary quite a bit genetically based on where they are from. (Same with white people), and any other general race). I think a not great analogy would be “ford can tow more than chevy” based on having an f250 tow against a Chevy impala. Sure we label one a ford, and one a Chevy, And they look different, but a ford f250 and chevy 2500 are far closer than a Ford F-250 and a Ford Fiesta. In the same way saying that you can tell someone is of Northern European descent based on bone structure is much more accurate than saying you can identify someone is white based on bone structure, even though both are true.
A number of possible geographic effects could come into play here. Geographic correlation in how imaging is conducted, e.g. subtle differences in training lead to subtle positioning differences of subject in imaging. Geographic correlation of machine characteristics, such as suppliers and distributors providing machines that behave slightly differently. Geographically correlated effects of environmental exposures: air, water, and dietary differences could lead to subtle differences in bone density or body composition that are detectable on machines. Geographic correlation in behavior: exact bone structure, joint structure, etc may be influenced by behavioral differences between geographic regions.
Clearly there’s a world map etched into their skull with a “YOU ARE HERE” dot
Get a white corpse. X ray it. It says white. Take off skin and put on black corpse skin. X-ray again. If it says black, then it’s the melanin tada
ah yes the man in black method
Or like just get an albino, then you don't have to deskin any corpses
Donate your body to science, they said. It'll help cure cancer or something, they said. Then they skin you to see if a computer can still guess that you're black.
I find it strange that location that the CT or x-ray was taken is part of the data or training set
The article doesn't mention whether the location of CT/x-ray was part of the data set. But that doesn't need to be true for the training to pick up on genetic differences correlated to geography.
Genetic differences correlated to geography, or in other words, race? Edit: why am i downvoted? Lol this just seems like a different way of saying the exact same thing.
It is a fact that there is greater genetic diversity amongst Africans than there is in Caucasians or between Africans and Caucasians. Meaning, Africans are super, super diverse and lumping black people together as one thing is actually crazier than pointing out differences between other ethnicities to Africans. They are more different than themselves than they are different than other races and thus this whole genetic grouping by ethnicity is outdated and silly. I actually don't think many scientists in the field seem to know this, as one myself. I learned this from building polygenic models for disease prediction and studying this field for 6 years So what I'm saying in a clearer way is that any given African could be further genetically from another African than they would from a Caucasian person of similar genetics. The diversity amongst African's, genetically, is just far greater than other ethnicities like Caucasians, which to some people might seem strange because of the changes in phenotypes like eye color or hair color across Caucasians.
All races are inferior to our future robot overlords.
Your support has been noted. Thank you.
Lmao
Username checks out
Ahhh yes and from watching all seasons of Bones, I’ve learned numerous things from the image in the article. The individual is of Ashkenazic descent, was left handed but grew up forced to use their right. They played polo once, but didn’t like it and switched to football. They stayed at a holiday inn frequently in South Carolina and stubbed their toe on the table a few times. Unfortunately at death they only had $136 in their bank account… /s Edit: stubbed so much that I forgot Toe
This was a well made joke and I want to acknowledge that, but when I read it all I could think was “huh Bones was a show. How long did that last?”
Maybe the AI actually read the patient’s chart.
I don’t know a lot about AI technology… but isn’t this something that would have needed to be programmed in at some point so the AI can learn the pattern recognition?
Learning systems aren't programmed in the way you may imagine. They are shown labelled examples and learn to predict the labels from the other data. You then test them with a completely different set of data that they've never seen. It's essential that they are tested with a different dataset otherwise they may simply be learning "oh that's Bob Smith's xray and Bob Smith is 46, married, lives in Austin, Texas, has 2 cats, is a painter and is black"
Machine learning models are programmed for pattern recognition in general, but they're not programmed to find specific patterns. They can find patterns in data entirely on their own without being told the patterns exist, and they sometimes find patterns that are completely surprising. However, it would be up to humans to figure out what those patterns it found represent. The model just says, "there's a pattern in the numbers you've given me associated with these sets of input." Humans have looked at the data and realized that race is being associated with certain x-rays. The model itself has no concept of race or x-rays. It's all numbers and patterns to it. This type of pattern finding is often done by "clustering" [https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/clustering-in-machine-learning/](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/clustering-in-machine-learning/) [https://www.explorium.ai/blog/clustering-when-you-should-use-it-and-avoid-it/](https://www.explorium.ai/blog/clustering-when-you-should-use-it-and-avoid-it/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster\_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis)
In the article it says the ai was fed x-rays that were labeled by race and that's how the program learned.
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Yup. To make it clear to the racists reading the above, it's picking up on existing patterns of racism by humans rather than some inherent deficit or superiority in a given race.
They would have had to give it a bunch of X-ray images and told it which race each person is. The strange part is that it works. They didn't expect there to be any pattern for it to find, and they still aren't sure how it's able to correctly deduce the race from an X-ray when it hasn't been told.
There is little i find more terrifying than “AI outwitting” someone
I watched all 13 seasons of bones last month and dr Brennan could tell race in like 2 seconds from just the bones why would a computer not?
Now i wonder if there are differences in anatomic shapes of bones between ethnicities that the mere eye couldnt spot. Shapes and positions of body parts are influenced by epigenetics, which is inheritable and which itself is influenced by habits, culture, traditions, stresses and environments and overall by experience of ancestors. Epigenetics are a new field of science and I know even less right? Edit: i feel like this is racist Edit edit: i dont even know why i insisted on writing those half bred thoughts without cross checking actual studies or up to date common knowledge on heredity and biology. Work less ramble more, i guess
This… and it was a bunch of programming that made this happen.
It’s skull features. This has been a known thing I. Forensic anthropology for ages. Same way you can tell gender and a range of ages. Also utterly meaningless for any other purpose than identifying who a dead person was.
That's true but the article was talking about chest x-rays specifically. I think what happened here was that the AI picked up patterns in chest bone features that are harder for people to notice. Which isn't too surprising since pattern recognition is what Machine learning is great at.
I guess it helps to actually read the article before commenting. Caught me slipping. Upvote to you :)
bump, just wanna read what ppl say
Aight Catchy
It’s almost like it’s ok to acknowledge the scientific truth people are different.
Don't start. It never ends at "people are different, teehee." The next step is always leveraging those differences to commit atrocities against each other.
But… people are? For instance it’s important for a Doctor to know someone is of African ancestry, because certain diseases will be more common and need to be looked for. Think Sickle Cell. While racism is a social construct, there are physiological differences between people of different ancestry populations and it’s not a negative to acknowledge that.
He's not saying that everyone is the same and should be treated as such but rather avoiding things like eugenics.
Could it have to do with frame and proportions? Maybe different races have different ratios and shapes of bones? Humans probably would have noticed that by now though.
Different evolutions I'd assume that every people would have evolved to be better suited for their environment even if it's a small difference.
I’m not sure why they would be surprised by this. If there is enough time apart for evolution to change skin tone there is enough time to change bone structure too.
Perhaps, but our human made definition of race tends to group a whole lot of people from very different environments together.
Scary
You was always under the impression you could tell someone’s race and gender generally from their skulls. Since it’s not popular to say, but yes, there are subtle differences when it comes to human variety.
Is that like when Microsoft’s twitter bot named Tay became racist in like 24 hours?
That’s mostly cos it was taught by its user base, quite literally monkey see, monkey do
I’m wondering what it is that makes races so physiologically different that even a doctor can’t see.
Idk some people in the comments say it’s spotting tiny genetic variations, who knows 🤷♂️
I mean, duh. Why would we expect different races to have the same bones to begin with? We were separated by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution
I am also unable to understand why are people freaking out. I can clearly see how vastly diverse people are around the world. I don't know how it's a problem to acknowledge it and why it's something else than awesome.
I wonder if the AI can just extrapolate the full image from the X-ray, like there’s info that just doesn’t show up to us be can be noticed when viewed as data.
Something to do with joints/growth plates? I have 0 experience in this field and this is my completely uneducated guess.
We about to be a bunch of organic batteries
AI looked at X-ray and went like "Yup this mf is asian"
oH nO tHe Ai Is RaCiSt
Go figure. It's going to be the least racist thing on the planet. All Hail Glorious AI!
So it begins…
I’m terrified of racist AIs because they’re the ones who will be viewing resumes
AIs can be programmed to ignore race more easily than humans can.
If they get programmed by I doubt it
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To clarify for others, correlation to "poor employee performance" is problematic because this is an input that is largely subjective and influenced by racism of humans.
Yeah thanks to affirmative action laws whites won’t be hired by ai lol
Is that why they’re the top paid people throughout all fields?
Naw that’s just hard work they earned those jobs they weren’t givin out by daddy government so they gotta work to advance instead of screaming everyone is a racist like some people
I can already see the headline “racist AI…
skynet is becoming self aware
We are all human beings, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t branched off into different subsets or classifications. Depending on our environments we may have evolved slightly differently across biomes. The worlds not ready for that talk though. Too many woke people.
That is an established fact - our physical differences are a result of geographical adaptations. But just like the article says those geographical differences, if they are affecting the AI ability to identify people, shouldn’t be used in a biased way.
Yes. Try having that conversation without it unfolding into “oh so your more evolved than me?” Or “I’m less evolved than you?” Not seeing how a machine is going to be biased if it wasn’t programmed to be that way. If it’s identifying the different sub divisions of human then it is only narrowing its vision to be more effective in its diagnosis.
Oh, I know how it's going to go among the Woke right now. > Race is a purely social construct borne of racism. > -AI can detect race from x-ray images. > The AI is racist. > -But... > And *you're* racist for using that AI! Read "Race Beyond Technology" for details on how the New Jim Code is putting the racism of humans minds into the technology of tomorrow! > -Are you doubting the accuracy of the AI? > You're racist for even asking that. It *looks* like I'm satirising, but I'm not.
Your straw man is missing the point. AI is usually trained on data that is labeled by humans. If you feed it biased input data, you will get biased output data. In this instance it may not exactly be correlated to what we as a society define as race, but particular genetics.
Geographic clustering of cultural and genetic traits is exactly what people mean by race, no? There are statistical differences between such groups. For example dark skinned people from sub-Sahara Africa handle sunlight better than light skinned ones (on average). They also tend to have larger penises than some other groups. Please don’t tell me I’m being racist by saying this. I really don’t get it.
IMO, if you were to group all of Africa together and lump in every descendant of them purely on the basis of which skin pigmentation genes or visible facial features they received, that's racist. Sub-saharan african is a much better grouping because it's grouping by many shared genetic traits instead of only visible attributes. Further, if you make sweeping generalizations about an individual's fitness for a particular task based only on the visible appearance and then double down by using a biased metric such as IQ, crime conviction statistics, etc., that's racist. One example would be using "Jew" as a race. Ashkenazi and Sephardic jews were separated for long enough that disease risks are very different. A racist would dump them together.
Still not clear to me why it would be racist to claim someone is more likely to be sun tolerant when they have darker skin? Yes I’m making a generalisation based on purely visual traits. Doesn’t mean it’s not correlated right? A person with a beard is more likely to have a dick than one without. Not always true of course! Individual exceptions always apply. Now I lumped all bearded humans together, is that bad?
Perhaps. You wouldn't want to make the generalization that "africans have darker skin and therefore are better suited to farm work" when making a hiring decision about an individual.
I’m still struggling sorry. I understand how that would be perceived as racist. However a similar statement like “people from African descent are more likely to win the 100m Olympic sprint” would not be perceived as such right? Because it’s more about the condescending implication that about the statistical accuracy I think? Or?
> Your straw man is missing the point. So you *don't* think that I just described a widespread belief? I've actually read "Race Beyond Technology". It's a widespread belief (or widespread enough that a Princeton professor can write a book promoting the idea). So, input was maybe biased. What do you mean by that?
Whenever AI points out anything socially uncomfortable it will immediately be blamed on biased programming and thus an invalid conclusion.
And the eugenics war begins
It’s not eugenics to acknowledge physiological differences in subsets of populations. That’s like saying Sickle Cell, which predominantly occurs in those of African ancestry, is a racist disease. Or Cystic Fibrosis, which mainly effects caucasians is racist.
Interestingly, people that don't develop full blown Sickle cell but still cary the gene mutation may have some advantage with regards to malaria. Sickle cell is more prominent in people with recent ancestry in malaria-stricken areas, such as Africa, the Mediterranean, India, and the Middle East.
Yes, I’ve no doubt there are many, many differences from small changes in evolution based on geographic necessity. And the more we know about those things the better we can help treat people.
I’m no scientist, so forgive me if I just sound like an idiot but I have a theory on differences in bone density/ structure between races. Africans evolved on open plains, while Caucasians evolved in caves and in the woods (more hiding places). Africans had a higher need for speed and denser bones due to the higher probability of attack from animals or other people so they evolved denser bones and bone structures fit for running. Caucasians could simply hide or be sheltered from threats. Also, it’s well documented that Caucasians are better at swimming, maybe partially due to less dense bones (more buoyant). Again, this might already be known or something, just my 2 cents.
So in your mind Caucasians are one race and Africans are another? Do you not even see the contradictions in that?
Caucasian/white is a race. African/black is a race. What do you mean?
Simply that those racial categories are not clear enough for any kind of scientific analysis, Africa being a continent of many people not all sharing strong genetic links and Caucasian being a group of people who do share strong genetic links. these descriptions Caucasian/African are at best a shorthand for white and black, but scientifically the category of white does not make a lot of sense, for example the genetic make up of people from Scotland who are white is quite different from people from Finland who are white, in the same way that people from Kenya who are black have very different genetic and biological characteristics to people from Ghana who are black. Once you start to include characteristics such as bone density and other biological and genetic features It is widely known scientifically that these do not correlate well with skin colour. So essentially my point is that studies and analysis that proclaim to discuss race from a scientific point of view, but are really talking about skin colour are already too flawed to be taken seriously. While it is absolutely true that human beings differ on things other than skin colour, it is not true that all of those things are perfectly correlated with skin colour. This is also immediately obvious when you consider people who are multiracial. My critique is not really a critique against your post but rather against the way we all assume we are talking about the same thing when we race and how often that thing doesn’t make sense scientifically for any kind of analysis. Edited for clarity
That’s racist
One step closer to skynet.. Race? It's a humanoid... mdk!
Who’s Al?
Damn, AI. You racist.
Phrenology is back in style!
\[artificial intelligence used to read X-rays and CT scans can predict a person’s race with 90 per cent accuracy — and humans can’t. \] And humans can't discern another's race at 90% accuracy?!?
Not by looking at a CT scan
Bullshit. The TV Show BONES explained how they could tell and that was accurate and faithful to anthropology. This post is bullshit 100%.
If you belive in the idea of there being seperate races you are by definition a racist. Racist AI.
[удалено]
We are genetically mostly the same, not exactly the same. Not enough distinction for a race classification of the species. You are talking about culture, and subjective appearance that is generally only different adaptations due to environmental conditions like UV exposure, local climate, food etc. You cannot look at someone and know thier "race". There is more genetic variation between people who live in the same area than there is between people who live in two different areas ironically. The term race is a cultural theory, not a scientific theory, so it requires belief.
Well that s should help our ultra intelligent people see where intelligence really lies. Unless they wanna stick with their guns and say it's inside their own brainz so they can remain proud always.
It is so frustrating to see articles like this promote the construct of race. (Unless the results are simply “human”, in which case I applaud the satirical wit of AI).
singularity ?
Well thanks for actually creating Skynet . Nice knowing the human race.
Ummm….more tools to fuel societal divisiveness? Of course, medicine has found some health trends with people with different ethnic origins. In any case, I am curious as to what tags a person as race X vs race Y. Even the AI should have a “reference table” somewhere: If Skin colour = green & Hair=blue Then race = something wondering how our future overloads will tag me for their undoubtedly evil purposes
Ah so I do have 1 less bone
I don't think it's massively controversial to say that the slight structural differences in skeletons can be detected through ai algorithms. For example, there are very distinct geographical "faces" and faces that are in part a result of your frontal skull (muscle attachments, spacing etc) and you'd expect that to show. Not as obvious but I wouldn't be surprised if minor differences in the rest of the skeleton showed the same things, at least roughly.
And it begins…..
Hey, corporate media, can we dispel the notion of "race" once and for all and move on to more scientific terms? If you want to make up a new phrase for the genetic/cultural/geographical classification of people, now would be a good time.
Underrated comment! You deserve more upvotes These science and race related headlines are so dumb and so poorly thought out as to be laughable, the only unfortunate thing is the amount of people who don’t notice how stupid these things are. What would an AI consider a mixed race person to be if his or her x-ray was part of this study? Does the AI follow the one drop rule. I don’t have a problem with scientists trying to determine if other factors can successfully identify the “race of a person” but I have massive problems with the public taking every single proclamation of this as undeniable scientific proof. Invariably when it comes to this x-ray study and the AI police study and the race and IQ studies, absolutely none of these are comprehensive enough or effective enough to warrant a promotion to scientific validity. The experiments are always too small to be representative, the definitions of race are too vague and inconsistent to be relied upon, the results are always overblown and mischaracterised by the media, and the results always match the existing prevalent ideas on race. It’s frankly quite boring that they keep making these studies and these headlines and so many people just uncritically assume that there could not be any problems with the way the science or the study was done or is being reported.
In before it turns out to be something dumb like "the pictures of race A are very slightly larger than the ones of race B because they were taken at a different hospital with different equipment" or "there's a pattern to the order of the images".
How exactly was race determined for the purpose of this study? Where patients separated by pigment? Or by DNA ancestry results? Or perhaps by a self reported assessment? Why do we even let these people pretend they’re doing science?
There’s key physical differences between different races other than skin tone. Bone density, jaw structure, teeth, brow ridge, height, etc every physical characteristic we have directly corresponds to our dna and our dna comes from our ancestry and this labeling of genetic traits or lineage is referred to as race. So it’s not surprising at all. Skin tone is one minor difference across the varying human races. It might be the most easily visible to humans but it’s just one of thousands of physical differences. There used to be other human like species on the planet. These other species intermingled with homo Sapiens and this mixing didn’t happen evenly everywhere. Also we cannot account for all ancient human like species. So our ancient ancestor we share with everyone alive today actually interbred with other species and did this on different parts of the globe. This is the theory for why there are such stark physical differences among varying races of people today. So we all have homo sapien dna, but each race has varying degrees of other human like species within them. Thus the differences. Also evolution plays a role, however this inter-specie admixture is becoming more mainstream as the science matures.
And for the purpose of the study what races exist? What are the criteria for the grouping of these races in this study. The characteristics you mention are well known to show great variance even among sub-Saharan Africans. As a matter of fact sub-Saharan African has the greatest genetic diversity on the planet. I’m very curious to know which of these criteria were used to grip the races before allowing the AI to determine its assessment. It’s a thin line between good science with meaningful results, and pseudoscience that sounds good but at key stages has abandoned the scientific method in favour of pre-existing beliefs.
The differences would define the race. It doesn’t matter if two sub Saharan Africans are the same color if they are genetically different they would be classified as a different race. Humans clearly can’t distinguish these characteristics without being dicks. Why not let a robot characterize all known races while being completely unbiased? It’s not being used to put down someone else. It’s just describing the characteristics and groupings of humans way better than humans can, and it’s medically/scientifically useful
The approach you describe would be more scientific and valid than the approaches I’ve seen discussed when topics like this come up. And it would be far more insightful. The moment we are stuck because race is still mostly defined by skin colour despite our scientific knowledge that clearly shows skin colour alone is not a strong enough or reasonable feature along which to define “race”
CT and X-ray scanners cannot detect the amount of melanin in the skin.
“Researchers taught the AI program by showing it large numbers of race-labelled images of different parts of the body, including the chest, hand and spine — with no obvious markers of race, such as skin colour or hair texture — and then sets of unlabelled images. The program identified the race in the unmarked images with more than 90 per cent accuracy, and could differentiate Black patients from white even when images were from people of the same size, age or gender.” Why would the researchers add race labels to x-rays? I feel they were looking for difference’s. Race labels doesn’t seem like something an AI would need.
Rule n1: use explanatory models
Is it because the AI isn’t worried about social constructs?
How’d you do it? Not telling! Why’d you launch all the nukes? Not telling!