Fry: An early skin cancer AI classified malignancy by spotting rulers
Hannah Fry · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · Jul 7, 2020 · at 18:43
Mathematician Dr. Hannah Fry discusses spurious correlations in early medical machine learning models with Shane Parrish.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There was a skin cancer diagnosis algorithm that was picking up on lesions on people's skins, photographs taken by dermatologists was the training set. And it turned out that the algorithm wasn't really looking at the lesion itself at all. It was deciding whether or not it was cancerous based on whether there was a ruler photograph next to it or not.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Hannah Fry
Fry: Hyper-sensitive cancer detection AIs risk triggering massive overdiagnosis
“And the real danger of relying too much on algorithms to detect those cancerous cells is that if you are too good at detecting them, you're not just good at detecting the ones that then go on to be a problem. You're also going to be good at detecting the ones …”
Fry: Judicial sentencing varies based on arbitrary factors like sports losses
“There's studies that show that if you take the same case to different judges, you get a different response. But even if you take the same case to the same judge and just on a different day, you get different responses. Or judges who have daughters tend to be m…”
Fry: Driverless racing lacks the human emotional stakes audiences crave
“And I think that in many ways, the thing that makes Formula One or other racing so fascinating to watch is because you have it sitting in that gigantic, you know, engineered machine with so much science and technology going into it. You have a person who cares…”
Fry: Open-sourcing algorithms fails to provide effective public accountability
“If you publish the code, if you publish the source code of something, the level of technical knowledge and time actually that it would take to interrogate that as an outsider, enough that you have a really good understanding of how it works, enough to be able …”
Fry: AI regulation requires an FDA-style independent auditing board
“Some of the suggestions have been, and I think this is one that I broadly support. Some of the suggestions have been to copy the pharmaceutical industries model. So where you have a separate board, like the FDA, who have the ability to really interrogate these…”
Fry: Mathematical modeling justifies early pandemic lockdowns before deaths surge
“The reason why we know that that's a bad, why, why we're in a bad situation, and the reason why we know we need to take these extreme measures to essentially shut down our borders, to shut down our country, is because the mass is telling us what is coming next…”