IDG Contributor Network: Are artificial intelligence systems intrinsically racist?

At the heart of AI systems are statistical models that have no concept of social inequality, fairness, or hardships. In Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction (WMD), she points out that big data is discriminating nearly at every juncture of our society and pummeling the poor at each opportunity. How is this happening? Her book points to many avenues of misuse of data, but most offensive is through the use of proxies. Proxies are statistical correlations. Data statistics tha