'Algorithmic Reparation' Calls for Racial Justice in AI

Forms of automation such as artificial intelligence increasingly inform decisions about who gets hired, is arrested, or receives health care. Examples from around the world articulate that the technology can be used to exclude, control, or oppress people and reinforce historic systems of inequality that predate AI. Now teams of sociologists and computer science researchers say the builders and deployers of AI models should consider race more explicitly, by leaning on concepts such as critical race theory and intersectionality. Critical race theory is a method of examining the impact of race and power first developed by legal scholars in the 1970s that grew into an intellectual movement influencing fields including education, ethnic studies, and sociology. Intersectionality acknowledges that people from different backgrounds experience the world in different ways based on their race, gender, class, or other forms of identity.