March 20, 2023, 6:30 PM EDT
The data journalist and NYU professor discusses confronting race, gender, and ability biases in tech.
The word glitch implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren’t just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they’re coded into the system itself? In her new book, Meredith Broussard demonstrates how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable. A data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, Broussard explores facial recognition technology that favors light skin, mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, and the dangers of medical diagnostic algorithms trained on insufficiently diverse data.
In conversation with Alondra Nelson, Broussard discusses More than a Glitch and solutions that aren’t about making tech more inclusive, but rather rooting out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with.
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