The Week in Tech: Algorithmic Bias Is Bad. Uncovering It Is Good.

And my colleague Cade Metz reported that artificial intelligence services from Google and Amazon both failed to recognize the word "hers" as a pronoun, but correctly identified "his." Other, similar algorithms "generally don't give women enough credit" when analyzing text, he added. Algorithms are written by humans, who are inherently biased -- and that can seep into the way they frame the analysis that underlies their code. Artificial intelligence software is trained on data that contains all kinds of human biases, which can then appear in its own inferences. "What algorithms are doing is giving you a look in the mirror," Sandra Wachter, an associate professor in law and A.I. ethics at Oxford University, told me.