To save us from a Kafkaesque future, we must democratise AI

The history of artificial intelligence is entwined with state and corporate power. It must now reflect those it has excludedPicture a system that makes decisions with huge impacts on a person’s prospects – even decisions of life and death. Imagine that system is complex and opaque: it sorts people into winners and losers, but the criteria by which it does so are never made clear. Those being assessed do not know what data the system has gathered about them, or with what data theirs i