“‘In this bleak depiction of our future, decades of fights for civil rights and equality have been unwritten in a few lines of code,’ said EqualAI executive director Miriam Vogel at the conference in Brooklyn, N.Y., called ‘Boundary Breakers: Women Driving The Future of Tech.’

“Women and minorities are not building AI, and therefore, they are not being represented in popular algorithm-based products, according to Vogel. Algorithms find patterns throughout history, and essentially make predictions based on stereotyping, she said.
Already, facial recognition technology perceives white men more easily than women and minority features, Vogel said. Minorities are being denied credit cards due to where they live [and] due to their area’s history of poor credit.

“Large companies are using AI in their hiring practices, which leads to inevitable implicit bias that is difficult to detect, Vogel said to the crowd of about 55 tech thinkers.

“‘The people employing these AI products probably don’t even know their outcomes are discriminatory,’ said Vogel. ‘AI becomes a mirror. It reflects and it magnifies the biases in our society…’”

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