5 Questions on Data & Justice with Cathy O’Neil – Catherine D’Ignazio – Medium
▻https://medium.com/@kanarinka/5-questions-on-data-justice-with-cathy-oneil-87f42355ce55
Cathy O’Neil is a data scientist, blogger, contributing columnist at Bloomberg, and author of the recent book Weapons of Math Destruction. She is an eloquent and urgent voice on the inequality present in algorithms, particularly those that use big data to sort people into categories (like “Good teacher/Bad teacher”, “Consider for hiring/Don’t consider for hiring”, “High risk for reoffending/Low risk for reoffending”). These kinds of decisions have real, material consequences for people’s lives. And while the automated systems that drive them may have the appearance of neutrality, they are often using inputs like zip code or last name that are proxies for race and ethnicity. The risk, for individuals and society more broadly, is that computational decision-making risks re-encoding structural inequalities around race, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. “Garbage in, Garbage out,” as they say in programming. Or, put more bluntly, “Racism in, Racism out.”
