Coded Bias

„The Guardian”, which recently published the first text written entirely by artificial intelligence, asked, Are you scared yet? In the digital world, there are, however, things much more disturbing than AI’s graphomaniacal manifesto. Why are facial recognition systems unable to recognize Black people? Did Amazon’s automated recruitment system automatically reject applications submitted by women? Why does artificial intelligence operate on the basis of racial and gender prejudices? Who really wants to get a hold of our biometric data? Despite appearances, these aren’t the subjects of Black Mirror episodes. This is how a large part of the digital world works. AI systems “learn” by observing network users and adopting their views and vision of reality. Shalini Kantayya, together with some of the top Internet and digital culture researchers, sheds light on a world in which our fates—our purchases, political choices, and whether we get a job we’ve applied for—are determined more and more often by a digitalized form of Big Brother. The question is, Do we still have a chance to fight this?