Dirty Data: Biased Algorithms and the Future of Work
“Ask a layman about artificial intelligence and they might point to sci-fi villains such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator. But the co-founders of the AI Now Institute, Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford, want to change the conversation. Instead of talking about far-flung super-intelligent AI, they argued on the latest episode of Recode Decode, we should be talking about the ways AI is affecting people right now, in everything from education to policing to hiring. Rather than killer robots, you should be concerned about what happens to your résumé when it hits a program like the one Amazon tried to build.”
“‘They took two years to design, essentially, an AI automatic résumé scanner,’ Crawford said. ‘And they found that it was so biased against any female applicant that if you even had the word ‘woman’ on your résumé that it went to the bottom of the pile.’ That’s a classic example of what Crawford calls ‘dirty data.’ Even though people think of algorithms as being fair and free of human bias, ... biased humans are the ones who create the data sets and the code that decides how that data should be evaluated; that doesn’t mean AI is useless, but ... we need to be interrogating how it is being made and deployed in the real world.”
Vox, April 8, 2019: “How will AI change your life? AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker explain.,” by Eric Johnson
Vox’s Recode Decode, May 23, 2019: “Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on surveillance, AI ethics, and how to regulate tech,” with Kara Swisher (1:19:00, audio)
AI Now Institute, April 2019: “Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI,” by Sarah Myers West, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford (33 pages, PDF)
