Artificial Intelligence in healthcare is racist

AI in healthcare has a bias problem. Last year, it came to light that six algorithms used on an estimated 60-100 million patients nationwide were prioritizing care coordination for white patients over black patients for the same level of illness.The reason? The algorithm was trained on costs in insurance claims data, predicting which patients would be expensive in the future based on who was expensive in the past. Historically, less is spent on black patients than white patients, so the algorithm ended up perpetuating existing bias in healthcare.Therein lies the danger of using narrow datasets in Artificial Intelligence: If the data is biased, the AI will be biased. That doesn't mean we should (or, now that the genie is out of the bottle, can) abandon AI.