Biased Algorithms Are a Racial Justice Issue

Decisions on where to send police patrol cars, which foster parents to investigate, and who gets released on bail before trial are some of the most important, life-or-death decisions made by our government. And, increasingly, those decisions are being automated. The last eight years have seen an explosion in the capability of artificial intelligence, which is now used for everything from arranging your news feed on Facebook to identifying enemy combatants for the U.S. military. The automated decisions that affect us the most are somewhere in the middle. A.I.'s big feature is essentially pattern matching.