As Zachary Lipton, an AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, explains, “Policy makers [are] earnestly having meetings to discuss the rights of robots when they should be talking about discrimination in algorithmic decision making.” Delving into the details of algorithmic auditing may be dull compared to drafting a Bill of Rights for robots, or devising ways to protect humanity against Terminator-like superintelligent machines. But to address the problems that AI is creating now, we need to understand the data and algorithms we are already using for more mundane purposes.
