Check Your Data Bias

As some know, I've been advocating for this for a few years now. For those who don't, hi! My day job is spent making digital products, consumer apps, and websites. I've been doing it for about 9 years now and as of 2017 I started to gain an interest in the technology leveraged to get these things working. Working closely with Engineering has helped me gain a better understanding of some of the systems leveraged as well as how net-new are created. I started doing some research on these systems and discovered that Artificial Intelligence is literally built on what we tell it and some has the ability to learn. In some instances, data is leveraged using historical records, this ranges from consumer spending habits, loan trends, to jail records. Given our history as a county, this means that some of our algorithms are being built on data with implicit bias. This is a problem. Why? because our banks, court systems, and even our native phone systems are perpetuating opinions that are harmful to marginalized populations.