Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcing discrimination

Whether it's police brutality, the disproportionate over-exposure of racial minorities to COVID-19 or persistent discrimination in the labour market, Europe is "waking up" to structural racism. Amid the hardships of the pandemic and the environmental crisis, new technological threats are arising. One challenge will be to contest the ways in which emerging technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), reinforce existing forms of discrimination. From predictive policing systems that disproportionately score racialised communities with a higher "risk" of future criminality, all the way to the deployment of facial recognition technologies that consistently mis-identify people of colour, we see how so called "neutral" technologies are secretly harming marginalised communities. The use of data-driven systems to surveil and provide a logic to discrimination is not novel.