In the light of current legal system issues happening in the US, I found this task extremely meaningful, interesting and current. It was hard to chose between release or detain with little information about their apparent crime and I often found myself torn in deciding. The statements from both prosecution and defendant swayed me slightly – however I found myself more relying on the algorithm of whether the defendant was more likely to “fail to appear, commit a crime or be violent”, primarily choosing detain if the rating was high for violent. However, really digging deep into this, after completing the task and sitting with it for a moment, what factors were used to determine their likelihood to be violent? Have I simply detained defendants based on a computer program that told me they’d be likely to be violent? Yes – and I have come to realize this after the fact, which does not seem fair at all and I’m most certainly misjudged some cases. How would a system know that someone would be more prone to be violent, did they have previous cases of being violent? Did an officer record false elaborated claims into their case that skewed this rating? Ill never know. I suddenly am realizing, through my reflection that I shouldn’t of relied on those computerized risk assignments to people, and should not of solely determined their fate based on that. I think algorithms are interesting in the sense of finding the user content that they are interested in, for example Tik Tok uses algorithms to keep your feed full of videos they think you would enjoy, as a user I think that’s a strength in the app. On the other hand, I can see how algorithms can be detrimental – causing a false narrative or skewed sense of reality in the information being presented.
