Just before the weekend, I stumbled over this article: Algorithms That Adjust for Worker Race, Gender Still Show Biases.
There are a couple of obvious questions that the title alone provokes:
Is it even possible to create technical systems without bias? Wouldn’t this require either the existence of a »ground truth« or a societal agreement on specific values that then can help specify a substitute ground truth?
Can or will we ever agree on what a bias-free system is? What is bias when there is not ground truth? A bias-free technical system has to reflect a reality that does not exist yet. Can we, as a society, agree on how this reality should be?
Isn’t one of the sources of bias the fact that technical systems are inevitable based on categorizations, i.e. the need to assign any non-continuous values into predefined categories so they become processable?
I don’t want to disqualify the endeavor for bias-free systems; whenever bias is visible, we have to work to remove it. But ultimately, we have to ask whether this is a goal we can ever reach, just like Achilles will never catch the turtle.
image created with midjourney from the prompt »engineers trying to build a bias-free machine, in the style of star trek TOS«