In October, Amazon had to discontinue an artificial intelligence–powered recruiting tool after it discovered the system was biased against female applicants. In 2016, a ProPublica investigation revealed a recidivism assessment tool that used machine learning was biased against black defendants. More recently, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development sued Facebook because its ad-serving algorithms enabled advertisers to discriminate based on characteristics like gender and race. And Google refrained from renewing its AI contract with the Department of Defense after employees raised ethical concerns. Those are just a few of the many ethical controversies surrounding artificial intelligence algorithms in the past few years. There’s a six-decade history behind the…
