The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people
They literally named it Skynet. They have an evil sense of humor.<p>Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn&#x27;t a terrible idea. But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world. Maybe only 50% of the people you detect are actually terrorists. Maybe it&#x27;s even worse than that. We can&#x27;t even test it because there is no validation set and unreliable labels.<p>The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial.<p>And the more I read the details, the more alarmed I am. The 50% figure I used above may have been way too high. The base rate of terrorists way too low and they have very little data to begin with.