&gt; training data and their construction<p>That&#x27;s what I&#x27;m talking about. Machine learning systems - and everything else that is the product of human decisions  - are a reflection of the biases, intentions, and other qualities of the <i>designer</i>. Even the initial choice to use a machine learning system is influenced by fallible humans.<p>Why use machine learning? What kind, and why? What is the underlying model that is being optimized? What data was it trained with? Is the design of the system a proxy for something else, intentionally or unintentionally?<p>The real world is complicated and messy, and any model of it is always gong to be incomplete.