Algorithmic Bias, Discover How It's Affecting You!
Guiding Questions
Am I Biased?
Yes, everyone is biased, We can be biased towards certain kinds of food or weather or even biased towards people who look and act like us. Having biases doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person, we all have biases! However, it’s important to be aware of them so that we can make sure we’re not acting on them in ways that hurt other people.
What is Bais?
Being biased means you have a tendency to lean in one direction, either in favor of or against, a certain thing. Biases can be positive or negative - if you are biased towards something you think positively of it, if you are biased against a thing, you think poorly of it.
Why is being aware of my biases important?
As our society moves towards a technology-driven approach to most things, there are more algorithms being used and more room for error and bias. It’s important that we both recognize and work to fix algorithmic bias, because it touches almost every aspect of our lives and society, and can create an incredible burden for many users.today.
Lesson 02
Algorithmic Bias
Algorithmic bias happens when a computer system produces repeatable errors that create unfair outcomes, such as privileging one group of users over other users.
What Causes Algorithmic Bias?
This bias can happen due to several different factors, including the way the algorithms are designed, unintended use of the algorithm, and lack of diversity in the data run through these algorithms, among other things. More often than not, our own societal biases and the biases of the people creating the algorithms leak into the system, causing algorithms to reproduce and reify biases that harm certain groups of users.
How is Algorithmic Bias Affecting our Society?
Algorithms, and in turn algorithmic bias, affect our schooling, jobs, search engines, recommendation systems, policy and laws, policing and justice, health, and healthcare, marketing, and advertising, social media, and privacy, to name a few. Algorithms are used to identify, label, and categorize people, and if that is done incorrectly, inappropriately, or with bias, it can cause detrimental harm to users.