Car insurers accused of discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts
Its obvious why this is happening; some form of statistical modeling or AI correlated having a hotmail account with being higher risk.<p>This is a serious problem with all AI that makes decisions like this. Having a Hotmail account is a symptom of a problem which could lead to higher risk, but it is judging that symptom as if it is a cause which leads to risk.<p>Its exactly similar to the supposition that black people statistically commit more crime, and thus should pre-emptively receive harsher bail or be profiled. Unless you can scientifically prove that ethnicity causes crime to happen, its disgusting. This is obvious to us.<p>In year&#x27;s past, correlation fallacies might have meant that black people were profiled by police more. Today, it means that we build AIs which make life-ending decisions like determining repeat offender risk, visa status, employment decisions, all of which predetermines an unknown outcome by correlating your known qualities with the known outcome of people with similar qualities to you.<p>We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of causation.