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.Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn'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's even worse than that. We can't even test it because there is no validation set and unreliable labels.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.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.