Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

by Joy Buolamwini

In a world where decisions about our lives are increasingly informed by algorithmic decision-making, we cannot have racial justice if we adopt technical tools for the criminal legal system that only further incarcerate communities of color. We cannot have gender equality if we employ AI tools that use historic hiring data that reflect sexist practices to inform future candidate selections that disadvantage women and gender minorities. We cannot say we are advocating for disability rights and create AI-powered tools that erase the existence of people who are differently abled by adopting ableist design patterns. We cannot claim to respect privacy rights and then have our school systems adopt AI-powered surveillance systems that reduce children to data to be sorted, tracked, and reprimanded for deviating from the algorithmic standard. If the AI systems we create to power key aspects of society—from education to healthcare, from employment to housing—mask discrimination and systematize harmful bias, we entrench algorithmic injustice. We swap fallible human gatekeepers for machines that are also flawed but assumed to be objective. And when machines fail, the people who often have the least resources and most limited access to power structures are those who have to experience the worst outcomes.

Great paragraph