How We’re Failing to Make our Data Nicer
Responsibility is an action.
Over the last decade, our whole society has become more acutely aware and enraged by the imbalance in people’s access to digital services and how sloppily our data is mismanaged by organizations. The last three years has seen a ramp-up of the impact to real people of certain Artificial Intelligence (AI) infused products and services. Let me list a few recent situations that made the news: facial recognition software misclassifies an innocent person and interrogates him as a criminal suspect, facial movement software unfairly scores a person’s “employability” during job interviews or the millions of people in the U.S. without broadband access because they can’t afford it.
The repercussions of AI-infused products and services has come regularly and, frankly, it’s unrelenting. Now that the public knows that digital systems are unfair and their data is misused for profits, we want tech to do what they’ve done before: fix the problem. The majority of tech companies revert to conducting webinars and panels as well as announcing the formation of an ethics board. And those with law degrees are overwhelming the ones speaking on these webinars and panels and sitting on these ethics boards, not those with computing or social science degrees.
