, Columnist
Amazon’s Gender-Biased Algorithm Is Not Alone
They’re everywhere, but nobody wants to know about it.
Bias in, bias out.
Photographer: William H. Alden/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
Internet giant Amazon recently ran into a problem that eloquently illustrates the pitfalls of big data: It tried to automate hiring with a machine learning algorithm, but upon testing it realized that it merely perpetuated the tech industry’s bias against women. What’s most troubling isn’t the discovery itself. It’s that most companies using similar algorithms don’t even want to know.
Welcome to the era of plausible deniability in big data.