Algorithms: how to make them fairer
It was the thirties. Robert Moses, the most powerful urban planner in New York's history, ordered the construction of bridges so low that buses could not pass. Buses were the transport of the poor and the black population. No law was needed: the bridge was exclusionary by design and by default.
In the digital version, the same happens: algorithms and language models become a moral architecture. When a homogeneous team decides how a facial recognition system works, when a company's financial logic determines which voices are amplified in an feed of information, or when an interface designed without regard for diversity leaves entire groups out, the gesture is identical to that of the low bridges. Every technical decision is, at the same time, a decision about who matters and what is "normal".
Article by Liliana Arroyo, Director of the Chair for Socially Responsible Digital Innovation (SoReDI) and professor and researcher in Esade’s Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability, published in Diari Ara.