What’s a Positive Feedback Loop?

The progress we are making in machine learning doesn’t come for free.

An infinite loop that never ends and doesn’t lead anywhere safe.

Look around, and you’ll see how things are changing at a neck-breaking pace! Every single day, we are using machine learning to power more and more of our lives.

But as much as I love all of this progress, it doesn’t come for free. Implementing machine learning comes with immense challenges that have the potential to reshape our society in unintended ways.

Understanding the source of these problems is the first step towards finding systematic solutions that make machine learning safe and valuable to everyone. I don’t have the answers, but today, I’ll give you three quick examples of the snake that bites its own tail.

Let’s talk about positive feedback loops.

Policing crime

Think about a city. Any city.

You probably know a neighborhood where police cars are more common than traffic lights. Usually, impoverished areas of the city. Usually, areas your mom taught you not to visit.

The police are there because there’s a lot of crime. They aren’t patrolling my street; they are laser-focused on those neighborhoods.

Let’s now build a machine learning model that uses all crime information to predict where the…