By Madison Butkus
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Sponsored by the Cary Library Foundation, the Needham Free Public Library (NFPL) hosted an online Zoom event with author Meredith Broussard. During this time, Broussard discussed her most recent book, “More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech”.
Within her book, Broussard points out the many flaws that are a part of the vast world of technology as it quickly continues to grow. From artificial intelligence (AI) to software data, the technology that we have today has an alarming amount of bias that is ultimately damaging to our society.
The NFPL’s website further explains, “Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained to only recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficient diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.”
While the development and ongoing progress of technology can be helpful at times, it defeats its purpose when it becomes biased towards different races, cultures, or genders. To bring this aspect into perspective, Broussard not only explained an array of different examples to further her point, but she also talked in great detail about how these machine learning systems are created.
More specifically, she stated that the way in which AI is created is ultimately the problem as to why all of these systems show discrimination towards certain groups of people. “If we think about how machine learning systems are made, it all becomes more clear. So the way that we make AI, or a machine learning system, is always the same. What we do is take a whole bunch of data, we plug it into the computer, and we say ‘Computer, make a model.’ The computer makes a model and the model shows the mathematical patterns and the data. And then we can do all kinds of amazing things with this model. We can use it to make predictions, decisions, generate new text or audio or video. … However, the accuracy of these systems is, for the most part, garbage. For example, there was a story recently about a predictive policing system that was wrong ninety nine percent of the time. So these technologies are not at all robust and they are extraordinarily inaccurate, especially for people of color, for trans and non-binary folks, and so on.”
Regardless of one's stance on technology, it is evident that flaws emerge from time to time. When considering the broader perspective, particularly in terms of bias and discrimination, changes must be made for our society to function properly and foster unity. Books and discussions, such as those with Broussard, offer hope that machine learning systems can evolve for the better.
