AI hiring algorithms come complete with dangerous bias.
About 70 percent of companies (and 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies) around the world use AI-powered software to make hiring decisions and track employee productivity. The problem? The tools work by identifying and replicating patterns around who was previously hired, which means they perpetuate the bias embedded in the system, locking marginalized populations out of employment. This is particularly tough for disabled people, people of color, and disabled people of color, who are often subject to employment discrimination.
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Amazon's AI recruitment tool discriminated against women.
The online giant created its own recruitment tool to help evaluate the resumes of people who for software developer positions. It was soon discovered that the algorithm was poorly ranking applications from people it assumed were women. This is because it was trained on a dataset that consisted primarily of men’s resumes that were submitted to the company over the past decade. The system was taught to penalized any resume that included the word “women’s” or listed that the candidate graduated from a couple of specific women’s-only universities. Use of the software has been discontinued.
Economic Justice Gender Justice Issue 2013Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency's Michigan Integrated Data Automated System incorrectly flagged about 40,000 people as committing unemployment fraud during the 2013–2015 period.
The state worked to fix the problems caused by the AI system, but the damage has major: the wrongly accused Michigan residents have been subjected to denied unemployment benefits, fines, repossessions, and even bankruptcy.
Economic Justice Issue 2023AI is poised to exacerbate the Black-white wealth gap in the United States.
The median wealth amassed by Black households in the United States is just 15 percent of what that of white households. That means that Black families have about $44,900 USD to their $285,000 USD. This is the result of many systemic factors that stretch all the way back to the the time of chattel slavery. The McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility predicts that AI will add about $7 trillion USD to the global economy each year, with nearly $2 trillion USD of that concentrated in the U.S. But it also warns that if generative AI technology development continues on its current trajectory, it will widen that wealth gap. The prediction is that by 2045, it will grow by a whopping $43 billion USD every year.
Economic Justice Racial Justice Issue 2023AI could be used to better meet the needs of the disabled, but there are currently many instances where it actively works against the disabled community.
In 2023, researchers at Pennsylvania State University published “Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Models,” which explores the bias embedded in several natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and models. They found that every single public model they tested “exhibited significant bias against disability,” classifying sentences as negative and toxic simply because they contained references to disability, ignoring context and the actual lived experiences of disabled people.
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