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Albert: New AI to End Racism
A fictional but scary story of where America is headed with AI and racism
Bedford prided itself on being the world’s first “bias-free city.”
With AI-trained autonomous everything — from traffic lights to court sentencing — its flagship “AI-brain” was AIbert, or Albert as they called it, the most advanced AI governance system on the planet.
Albert didn’t just run Bedford. Albert was Bedford.
Its programmers wrote it to be perfectly rational. Albert learned from millions of data points: historical trends, shifting demographic data, behavior, biometric profiles. Everything.
Even better, it made decisions much more efficiently than humans. In real-time — who got job offers, who got stopped by patrol drones, even who got emergency housing or drug treatment. And unlike humans, its creators assured the public: Albert has no prejudice. It was the end of human bias.
An end to lopsided and racist systems created and administered by flawed humans.
For the first few years, it seemed like paradise. Finally no more human bias.
Crime rates dropped. Employment soared. The city was cleaner. Homelessness was nearly eradicated. Traffic flowed better. The air felt cleaner.