Machine bias and the politics of artifacts

We will be kicking off our conversations with a pairing of a recent Pulitzer-nominated piece on algorithmic bias and a landmark text on technologically-embedded politics:
—  The first piece is a report on bias in algorithms predicting recidivism, published in the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner. You can find the piece here: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing
* Optional: For debate around the piece you can also see this MIT review article, the software company’s defence and the journalists’ response.
— The second piece is political theorist Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (Winner, L. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109 (1): 121-136).

Published by AJung Moon on October 3, 2019 at 5:26 pm under notes on readings.

Leave a Reply

Blog authors are solely responsible for the content of the blogs listed in the directory. Neither the content of these blogs, nor the links to other web sites, are screened, approved, reviewed or endorsed by McGill University. The text and other material on these blogs are the opinion of the specific author and are not statements of advice, opinion, or information of McGill.