Those more immediate issues had come up that same year at a conference sponsored by the White House. The talk of the conference had been an article published in ProPublica titled “Machine Bias.”13 The subtitle for the piece said it all: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.” AI was increasingly being used to make predictions in a wide variety of settings, and concern was mounting over whether the systems were biased against certain groups in various scenarios, including people of color.14
