Last week, Fourth View hosted a Zoom webinar titled, “Tech Toks: Is AI Racist?” with University of Michigan Professor and Director of the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) H.V. Jagadish, Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) Albert Fox Cahn, and Director of Civil Liberties at TechFreedom Ashkhen Kazaryan. It explored how technology is intersecting with race. From processing college applications to making lending decisions, the conventional wisdom that a computer would be more equitable may not necessarily be the case.

H.V. Jagadish gave a clear explanation as to what an algorithm was, the difference between the categories of “AI” and “algorithms,” and some of its capabilities, but made a cautionary note that AI needs to be monitored on a situational basis. And while AI can be very efficient and accurate, he acknowledged that the data it’s fed can be corrupted by historical bias. He did say, though, that the algorithms can be fixed and improved. He recommended more testing needs to be conducted by institutions that rely on AI to improve them and there needs to be accountability by others outside the system to check them.