S03E17 – Bail Bonds, a Texas Lawyer, and Google Glitches

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we have another guest: Ken W. Good, an attorney who specializes in bail bonds. We take advantage of Ken’s expertise to discuss a movement spreading across the US to end bail bonds under the premise that bail bonds can result in poor people being imprisoned because they cannot afford even low bail amounts. We discussed a Politifact article that investigated (and rated mostly true) a claim by Governor Gavin Newsom that only the US and the Philippines use for-profit or corporate bail bond systems. We used this as a launching point to discuss the consequences of changes to the bail system and whether they contribute to higher crime rates. Conveniently, we all agree that we don’t want more crime and that crime has gotten out of control in some locations, but don’t agree that we should retain bail for everyone or that our prisons are punitive and too full. We then turn to Google’s Gemini glitch that ended up creating inaccurate historical images that reflect a diversity bias over accuracy. We agreed that historical accuracy is important and that Google needed to fix it’s AI. We did not end up agreeing that truth is always more important than diversity, with Ryan arguing that truth is complicated and, while it is should always be pursued, it’s not always clear what truth is. Ken disagreed and argued that there are capital-T “Truths” and they will always be more important than diversity.