Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Racial Justice

In this talk MIT Visiting Professor, S. Craig Watkins addresses one of the fundamental challenges in the AI Ethics debate: computational models that discriminate against marginalized populations. As the adoption of AI infiltrates more high stakes sectors such as policing, employment, health, and financial lending how do we build models that address systemic racism? The tech sector and researchers have focused on creating “fair” algorithms but Watkins asks, “what constitutes fairness in the context of structural racism?” The talk pushes the developers and adopters of AI to think in more nuanced ways about ethical and responsible AI and how these systems can be a force to eliminate rather than perpetuate structural inequities.