Algorithm Imbalance Benefits The Privileged And Harms The Disadvantaged

Rare is the tech company that isn’t using some form of algorithm these days to conduct business. It’s in everything, from search engines to advertising strategies. However, recent trends seem to indicate a disturbing development where algorithms are creating a devastating imbalance in society. Observable effects include patterns that regularly harm the disadvantaged while benefitting those who are privileged.

As Futurism notes, algorithms are great for automating tasks that would have taken forever when done manually. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that tech companies don’t have as much control over their machines as they should. As a result, the spread of fake news courtesy of Facebook and hate speech due to Google has become an international problem.

There is also the matter of reinforcing racist, sexist, or offensive stereotypes that algorithms regularly perpetuate. There’s the recent study by Harvard researchers, for example, where searching for names in the African-American community on Google yielded results such as access to criminal records.

Then there’s the Pew Research study where MIT Teaching Systems Lab executive director, Justin Reich notes how current algorithms are designed to be selective. Supposedly, these programs benefitted those who are commonly the ones to create them, which are rich, white or Asian males.

“Most people in positions of privilege will find these new tools convenient, safe, and useful,” Reich said. “The harms of new technology will be most experienced by those already disadvantaged in society, where advertising algorithms offer bail bondsman ads that assume readers are criminals, loan applications that penalize people for proxies so correlated with race that they effectively penalize people based on race, and similar issues.”

In essence, current standards in creating algorithms are only encouraging the widening gap between those with power and those without. The technology that should be used to promote equality is actually producing the opposite results.